All throughout high school, the importance of going to college was everywhere. If it wasn’t my parents, it was my teachers. If it wasn’t my teachers, it was the guidance counselor. Everyone stressed the importance of college. In fact, they were even more specific. They stressed the importance of getting into a good college, which in guidance counselor terms meant a college that was good in the field you were interested in. In many many cases, that college was a private university. While safe advice, it’s not necessarily true.

Going to a public university gives you a better shot at success than a private university. You don’t have to go to a private university to succeed. In fact, going to a private university gives you no advantage over a public university. To take it to an extreme, going to a private university puts you at a disadvantage in life because you are paying significantly more for your education, thus saddling you with debt obligations, with no benefit.

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You should not sacrifice your retirement, your savings, or your future financial stability in order for your children to attend college. They are fully capable of supporting themselves, just as generations have before them.

The average cost of a year at a private four-year college institution in 2007-2008 was $23,712. The cost of a year at a public four-year college institution was $6,185. Both were increases of over 6% from the prior year and don’t even include room and board! [CollegeBoard.com]

Bottom line (a surprise to no one): College is expensive.

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When Patrick at Cash Money Life tagged me for this meme, he said that I probably had a couple little “hustles” going on the side when I was in college. I have no idea how he knew, though I had hinted about them in the past (selling stuff on ebay, online poker and blackjack), I don’t think I ever really wrote them all out in their full glory. I had some pretty lucrative things going, in college student terms, and it certainly easily sustained my lifestyle. However, the number one best financial move in college made the rest pale in comparison.

The number one best financial move I did in college was to graduate a semester early. That one move alone saved the cost of one semester’s tuition at Carnegie Mellon University, located in Pittsburgh, PA; which amounted to somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 plus room, board, food, whatever. I was able to do that because I always loaded myself up with classes, with AP classes in high school and then regular classes in college, and always pushed myself to the limit for those three and a half years. I don’t think all my little side projects, in total, earned close to that.

Of course, that financial move isn’t at all interesting and is borderline boasting (“oh look how smart Jim is!” we won’t go into what my grades were, shhhh!), so let me tell you about the most interesting of the side jobs I had:

Selling on eBay: eBay had started to get big and the whole “Buy Hot Deals from Fatwallet and resell on eBay” was still in its nascent stages. Whenever I see someone trying to make money, I try to figure out how that person is making money and then try to do it and then improve on it. So I saw these great deals on eBay for brand new products and so I investigated where they must be getting these great deals. Some were getting them wholesale (I didn’t want to get a tax ID and go through that process so I skipped it) but some were just buying stuff that was cheaper after rebate and then selling it on eBay. I did that a couple times before I realized the effort wasn’t worth it.

Eventually, I realized that what you needed to do was find products on sale where the eventual buyer wouldn’t be searching the Fatwallet forums or other deal sites. Computer and electronics shoppers are savvy enough to search the forums for a deal so eBay margins on those items is much lower. If you want DVDs, hats, and sports jerseys… those shoppers go to eBay first. Over the course of a year or so I sold maybe a eighty Michael Jordan Wizards jerseys, fifty John Deere hats (this was after Ashton Kutcher made them popular on Punk’d), and who knows how many DVD sets (my fiancee likes telling the story about how we ripped open a package from Canada of Band of Brother Gift Sets and then shoving them into packages for the post office because I was late on shipping them).

Eventually it got to the point where I was tired of looking at the eBay completed sale pages to try to figure out how much something could sell for and I put that Carnegie Mellon Computer Science education to good use. It took a few hours but I put together a Java application that went onto the eBay website and screen scraped the text off the completed auction pages. It collected the last two hundred auctions and then ran some simple statistic numbers. It told me percentage sold, average sale price, standard deviation, range, and who knows what else. I just wanted to know, in a few seconds, whether I could make money with a deal. It eventually started collecting the names of bidders, repeat bidders, losing bidders, and other information that would tell me how many people out there still want this stuff. So if someone was a losing bidder many times, I know at least one person is going to probably want this.

I actually sold the tool, after converting it from a Java app with a GUI to strictly command line, to a PhD candidate friend of a friend for $500, the first, and only, time I had sold a piece of software for money. It was pretty cool! Now eBay’s systems make the tool useless as they now require login, sanitize much of the bidder information, and otherwise make data collection difficult for people who don’t use their API. It was still a ton of fun though and I learned quite a bit from doing it.

So there you have it, both the smartest and the most interesting financial move I made in college. The smartest overall move, of course, was meeting my lovely wife!

When you’re young, have little or no income, and want to build a credit history, it’s really difficult. The current credit environment has made it much more difficult so here are a few methods I’ve used, or have seen recommended, in the past in order to build your credit history.

One tip that has been removed from lists like these is the Authorized User tip. In the past, a parent could add a child onto one of their accounts as an authorized user and the child would see credit history benefits. Many people took advantage of that by “renting” out these authorized user slots and so FICO responded by cutting that link. Now, it appears, that authorized users have no bearing. This is the case of people trying to subvert the system for profit and the system, rightfully, punishing everyone. You can read more about the whole authorized user practice here.

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This is a guest post by Anna Ivey, more on her at the end of this article.

The working world is a completely different beast from the college world, and the transition can be a bumpy one. There’s been a lot of talk about how Gen Yers demand meaningful responsibility on the job, and I’m all in favor of internships and starter jobs that offer opportunities for challenge and increased responsibility. However, you have to earn those things, and prove you can handle them.

I’ve also noticed a fundamental lack of respect by many twenty-somethings for the people they work for. That lack of respect can manifest itself in something as small as addressing an email or consistently refusing to follow — or even acknowledge — instructions. (And even if your boss is a drooling idiot, it’s in your interest not to reveal your contempt.)

The following eight tips might seem completely obvious to some people, but I’ve seen this behavior often enough that I’ll list the most common issues here, as simply and bluntly as I can.

1. Respect the English language.

If you can’t be bothered to spell properly when you’re writing to your boss or a customer, what does that say about you? We all fall victim to typos, and there are certainly different standards for text messages or wiki postings (or blog postings!) and more formal kinds of communications. But… ignoring the “shift” key altogether, when you’re writing to someone you’re supposed to impress? Not good. Same goes for proper grammar and precise vocabulary. Language is power. Don’t believe me? Read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (“the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”).

2. Banish “hey.”

Banish “hey” from your written communications (and spoken communications, for that matter).

Your colleagues are not your BFF’s (“hey dwight”), or even your MySpace/Facebook friends. They might turn into friends, but don’t impose that casual familiarity unless and until the relationship warrants it. Posting a message on someone’s Facebook wall and writing an email to your boss are two completely different things. (I remember calling someone a few years back to offer him a job, and thinking how badly I wanted to retract the offer when he told me how “stoked” he was. Argh.)

3. Follow directions, and don’t make your boss ask twice.

If your boss asks you to put the customer name in a header for all of your project documents, don’t send him a document without the customer name in the header. Simple, right? And if your boss has to remind you, don’t make him remind you again.

4. Don’t ask for clarification of perfectly unambiguous instructions.

If you’re asked to get the TPS reports on your boss’s desk by the afternoon, don’t ask him, “When do I need to get you those reports?” Or if you’re asked to restrict your report to 5 pages, don’t send him an email asking, “Is that a hard limit?” Your boss’s time has value, and stupid questions tend to waste his time. (Contrary to the brainwashing you’ve received in school, there is such a thing as a stupid question.)

5. Just OK is not enough.

Every day that you show up at work is another day you need to justify your employment. If you’re not doing your best, why should they keep you? Your job is not pass/fail, and the job interview never really ends. Don’t wait until your first performance review to shape up.

6. Tell your parents to butt out.

Don’t ever — EVER — let your parents contact your employers. If you want to be respected as a mature, independent professional, act like one and leave mommy and daddy out of it. Expecting your employers to deal with your parents is beyond lame. They hired you — not your parents — and it’s not a package deal.

7. Get used to grunt work.

I don’t care how smart or “entrepreneurial” you are, or how impressed you are with yourself, or how great your parents think you are. When you’re starting out in the working world, you’re going to do a lot of grunt work. It’s the only way to learn the ropes, and nobody is above it. Nobody. If you think you deserve to be entrusted with matters of importance in a starter job, you have delusions of grandeur. Plus, true entrepreneurial types do plenty of grunt work, and they don’t complain about it, because they know it needs to get done if the overall project or venture is going to succeed.

8. Understand your role.

As long as you’re reporting to someone, understand that your job is to make her life easier, not the other way around.

Anna Ivey, a recovering lawyer, decided the fates of thousands of applicants as former dean of admissions at a top-ten law school and now works with high school students and twenty-somethings to help them make smart choices in school, at work, and in life. Anna has appeared on CNN and Fox News Channel, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Business Journal, Fortune.com, Smart Money, and Marie Claire. Anna speaks at colleges around the country and publishes The Ivey Files, a blog for twenty-somethings, the parents who love them, and the bosses who manage them. Learn more about Anna at www.annaivey.com.

When I went to college, all I took with me financially was $500 and a laminated ID card from my local credit union. I had no idea what credit cards were, I didn’t really understand the idea behind loans other than the fact that I had the maximum of Stafford Loans, but I did know I’d be perfectly alright because my room and board were taken care of. I had a meal plan with the school and I had all the “stuff” I really needed (clothes, books, computer, etc.) so I was well prepared for school. While I wasn’t poor, not any more poor than your average college student, my resources were just scarce and scarcity educates like no other.

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Thinking about college? Good for you! College is very important and it’s something everyone should consider, whether or not you end up attending one, but before you make that decision, I think it’s important for you to know that you don’t need college to succeed in life. This isn’t going to be an article where I redefine success as having a happy and healthy family (which is one very good definition of success for some), no, by success I mean financial success. Financial success differs from one person to another but at the most basic level it means you have enough money to do whatever you want, within reason. Based on that definition of success, I believe you don’t need to attend college to be successful.

College Doesn’t Guarantee Success, It Guarantees Debt

Compared to not having a degree, graduating college gives you a better chance at landing a job, that point is not disputed. However, a degree does not guarantee anything except the fact that you’ll have paid thousands of dollars and likely be in debt. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average annual cost (tuition + room & board) for a 4 year public institution for the 2004-5 academic year was $11,441/yr, for a 2 year public institution it was $6,334/yr. At a 4 year private institution, the cost jumped to $26,489/yr and at a 2 year private institution you could expect to pay about $19,899/yr. (Source) That puts the total price of a four year institution on average anywhere from $45,764 (public) to $105,956 (private)!

On The Job Training

In school I learned all sorts of algorithms, discrete math problems, and numerous other theoretical constructs of computer science – in three years I’ve only had to use one sorting algorithm I remembered in college. With the advent of Google and other powerful searching engines that have opened up the world of knowledge to me and the average worker, if you’re smart you can learn something quickly and on the job. Everything I’ve learned about blogging was learned as I went along. The college education I received personally was invaluable but not indispensable. While it did prove I had the fortitude and determination to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem (I had more than a few of those in college, not one of which was convincing my current fiancee to go out with me), that alone isn’t a requirement of success. It may be a necessary but not a sufficient precondition of success (I once was going to fence, yeah with foils, a logic professor of mine and when I asked him if I needed to let him win to pass the test, he told me ‘that’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition’… it’s an awesome line for all you nerds out there).

You Can Succeed Without College

Bill Gates (Harvard). Steve Jobs (Reed College). Michael Dell )University of Texas). Rush Limbaugh (Southeastern Missouri State University). Tom Hanks (CalState Sacramento). F Scott Fitzgerald (Princeton). There are plenty more… a college degree is not a prerequisite for success.

College Is For Networking As Much As Learning

I had a friend whose brother attended Harvard and everyone he knew was either the son/daughter/nephew/niece of a Senator, Representative, officer in an armed service, or otherwise famous individual; or an All-American athlete; or, and this was a smaller group, brilliant. There was and still is grade inflation (who wants to give Senator XYZ’s son an F?) and college life is essentially one giant networking session designed to put the children of those people in the system in touch with each other to build that network. While there is much learning involved, that network is the most valuable thing you leave college with.

What this means is that if you’re good at networking, you don’t need to go to college. If you’re capable of finding ways of extending your network, you don’t need to go to college in order to build that solid network from which you can reach out to in your times of need. My first internship was at a company that my high school friend’s dad worked at. Sure I had to prove I had the skills to do the job, at least marginally well considering, but I basically got that job because of my friend’s dad… otherwise I wouldn’t have had the opportunity. My second and third summer internships were also through friends I met in college. History is full of these types of stories and mine is not atypical.

Devin Wanzor is a senior at Oklahoma State University majoring in Finance. The majority of his spare time is spent golfing, reading personal finance articles/books, and renovating his condo and getting it ready to sell.

Majoring in Finance in college has helped me learn a great deal about taking care of my personal finances, as well as other advanced topics. What about people who aren’t Finance or business majors in college, or what about people who never go to college at all? I think that, in general, most of the classes I took in high school kept me busy, but lacked any knowledge that will be useful to me in my lifetime. There is one big topic that I think will be useful to everyone most of his or her life: money. It makes sense to me to teach these topics in high school, instead of having kids memorize vocabulary words that they will forget next week. I remember very little that I learned in high school, except for math and English skills.

You might think that since I am a soon-to-be finance professional, I would like to have a financial illiterate public to drive my business, but I believe that as more people learn about more sophisticated products (IRA’s etc.) then actually there would be more people in the U.S. seeking out advice and trying to make responsible financial decisions. In my opinion, a more informed customer is usually better.

Here is my 4-year plan of what kids should be learning in high school about money and personal finance: