College: How I Got the Most Out of My Parents' Investment

If you want to save money, or save your parents some dough, I do have one idea, but I don't see many people actually doing it, so there's probably some enormous drawback that hasn't occurred to me. It seems to me that the best way to pay less for a higher education is to graduate in three years.

You'll have more work and less fun, but if you're really concerned about tuition, schools don't charge you extra if you take more classes each semester.

If you can get credit for any advanced placement courses you took in high school, you can use them to take fewer classes and still graduate early. If you were going to pay full tuition plus room and board at a private college, then you'll pay more than $40,000 less if you can graduate in three years.

Yeah, you lose some of the "college experience." So what? College isn't a vacation resort. It's not a Four Seasons on some tropical paradise in the Caribbean. If college is the best time of your life, you're doing a bad job at living in the real world after you graduate. The people who tell you how much they loved college are conflating their experience of making new friends and spending time with them, with the entire experience of school.