The direct costs of college, which you’ll read more about in Chapter 2, are those that are related directly to the cost of acquiring your education. The most common include tuition, room, board, and books. Unfortunately, the term direct has nothing to do with these costs being clearly communicated. Many students and parents find that these costs are hard to get a handle on and change frequently throughout the college experience.

In anticipation of the cost confusion and angry phone calls, most universities have begun publishing a total cost of attendance for their schools that attempts to take into account all the unknown variables of attending college. Although this is very noble of them, the total cost for attendance at a school is not set in stone and can vary wildly from student to student. In other words, you should not rely on it because you could be in for some sticker shock.

Thus, the first step in figuring out how you’ll pay for college is to determine what you will have to pay for college. There is no point in stressing out, scraping together, or borrowing significantly more money than you need. On the flipside, failure to plan for enough funding can leave you up collegiate creek without a paddle.

In choosing not to trust a school’s total cost of attendance and instead estimating it for yourself, it is crucial to understand all the pieces that go into calculating the final bill. The cost of “tuition” you see on a school’s website, which can look pretty sizable all by itself, is only one piece of the puzzle. To put the whole thing together, you’re going to need to grab the first page of the College Cash Strategy Worksheet from Appendix B and begin filling in numbers for the categories we cover next.

The term tuition represents the actual cost of the education someone receives. It pays for the teachers, the buildings, the school’s administration, and the thousands of alumni fundraising letters you’ll get after you graduate. It does not include things like a dorm room, the student cafeteria, the cost of books, and other student fees.

Typically, tuition is expressed in a cost per unit, such as $250 per unit. This means that a single three-unit, semester-long class might cost $750. Similarly, a student taking five, three-unit classes in a semester would be paying $3,750 in tuition (15 units × $250 per unit).

Estimate the cost of tuition in your first year of attendance and enter it on the first line of the College Cash Strategy Worksheet. Of course, this estimate depends on whether you know where you’re going to college. If you or your student has been accepted or is currently enrolled, all you need to do is visit the school’s website or give them a call. Be sure that you use the tuition number for the entire year of attendance, not just one semester.

Room refers to a student’s cost of housing and can vary for different students at the same campus. Depending on the college and the cost of living in the surrounding area, room and board can actually run a student or parent more than the cost of tuition itself. In fact, room and board may be the easiest or hardest portion of your college costs to control.

Typically, the costs associated with room fall into one of two categories: on-campus and off-campus housing. If a student lives on-campus, he will most likely be in a dorm or campus-run apartment complex. If he lives off-campus, he could live anywhere from a beach-front condo to the backseat of his car.

You’ll typically have no problem finding the cost of on-campus housing on a school’s website because the school controls the cost of housing. Off-campus housing is a different story, though, because prices are essentially set by local landlords.

If you think there’s a good chance you’ll be paying for a rocking bachelor or bachelorette pad off-campus, you’re going to need to do some homework and make an educated guess about the average housing costs around the college. You should first call the school and see if it can give you a feel for what off-campus students are paying on a monthly basis. Then, you should get online and visit sites like Craigslist.com or the local newspaper’s online classifieds and look at the “Roommates Wanted” sections to see what a local room goes for.

Next, you need to multiply your monthly estimate by either 9 months for on-campus housing or 12 months for off-campus and then enter this total amount on your College Cash Strategy Worksheet. The reason that off-campus is multiplied by 12 is that most landlords require a student to pay for the whole year, even if the student comes home for summer or winter breaks.

Board is a fancy term for “food” and can also range in cost from very predictable to “anybody’s guess,” depending on whether the student eats some or all of her meals in the on-campus cafeterias and restaurants. On one end of the spectrum are full meal plans provided by the school. These can be very pricey, but they allow students to eat as much as they can for one set price. If you’re worried about your student coming home “all skin and bones,” this might be the plan for you.

In the middle are modified or partial plans that allow the students to eat a certain meal (such as dinner only) or a predetermined number of meals per month (such as 15 meals) in the school’s cafeteria or restaurants. This is a popular option, especially for younger, cooking-impaired students who are living off-campus. It helps to ensure that they don’t just eat macaroni and cheese for the next four years of their lives.

Of course, students who are preparing all their own food or getting regular pizza deliveries can end up saving or spending a ton depending on their shopping habits. Students or parents expecting this situation should allow themselves some wiggle room in their budgets to learn how to shop wisely during the first year of college.

So what is an appropriate number to fill in on your worksheet for board? If you’re going to be on the full meal plan, just use that number (or double it if it is priced per semester). If you’re going to use the modified or partial plan, you’ll need to enter that number, plus an estimate for the meals the student is buying on her own. If you’re going to skip the school cafeteria, then you’ll need to estimate the entire thing yourself.

As a rule of thumb, students shopping for themselves can expect to spend about $3 for each breakfast, $5 for each lunch, and $7 for each dinner. If your student is completely feeding herself, this amounts to roughly $450 per month.

If you’ve felt cheated out of any blood pressure-raising experiences this year, a trip to a college bookstore can make up for lost time. For those of us used to buying our books cheaply on Amazon.com or at the local warehouse store, the idea of paying $100 or more for one book leads to words my editor wouldn’t let me publish in here. In fact, a brand-spanking-new textbook can easily exceed $150 to $200. If you’re lucky enough to get to the bookstore before the mad rush, you may find some “gently used” versions of the same textbook discounted by 25 to 50 percent. This means that a student taking five classes can easily spend anywhere from $350 to $1,000 for books per semester!

Of course, many new college students find hope in the fact that college bookstores often buy back books from students. Some students even foolishly pay for their books on their credit card, hoping to get the amount refunded after the semester is over. But as many veteran students will tell you, the likelihood of this happening is pretty low and is affected by things like textbook updates, future class offerings, and the number of other students also wanting to sell back their books.

In trying to accurately estimate this cost, a parent or student can safely guess that they’ll incur an average of $125 in textbooks for every class they take during the year. If you think you’re going to realistically be paying for five classes in both the fall and spring terms, you should plan on spending at least $1,250 on books per year (5 classes × 2 semesters × $125 per book).

More and more schools are opting for electronic textbooks, which saves both money and the environment. Typically, these e-texts are 50 percent of the cost of regular books, making the costs much more bearable. By choosing a school that has embraced the e-textbook revolution, you can easily save $500 or more per year.