Hi, Everyone, I wrote this book because I kept hearing questions about college that I couldn't answer, and as a parent myself, I needed the answers too. I heard from: Parents in Harlem who wanted to know how much they should sacrifice to send a child to a private college instead of a state school. A family in Ohio who hadn't saved much and wanted to know whether they'd be punished for that. Guidance counselors in California struggling to help hundreds of students guess the admissions odds. How could they better predict financial aid too? Teens in Chicago who wanted their parents to talk honestly about what they were willing to spend and borrow. In a decade of writing for the New York Times, I hadn't found a clear formula for what to pay for college. So I set out to find one. As I reported, you told me you wanted help reckoning with unhelpful feelings that the process evokes. You wanted to know what was worth paying extra for. You wanted to know how the merit aid system works. And you definitely wanted to know what, exactly, we owe our kids. Thanks to my work on this book, I feel more calm about all this. My greatest hope is that when you're done reading, you will feel it too. Book jacket.