Dave Barry: Providing for your children's college educations

1. Length of the college name: The longer the name, the more mediocre and reasonably priced the college is likely to be. Thus you want to aviod colleges with names like "Smith" or "Brown," and look instead at colleges with names like "The Earl T. Bunderson Greater Tri-City Area Community College of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Pharmaceutical Arts and Applied Dental Hygiene and Waste Management Sciences." You should also beware of colleges with lengthy applications that ask suspicious questions like where your child went to high school, and what his or her grades were. You're looking for a college with a one-page application devoted almost entirely to explaining how you can pay by major credit card.

2. Mascot: The good college mascot names were taken long ago by old established schools, which tend to have higher tuitions. To find a school in your price range, look for a mascot along the lines of "The Fighting Sphincters."

3. Parking: Parking is the single biggest crisis facing American higher education today. Despite the fact that colleges are, theoretically, institutions of higher learning, it apparently has never occured to the geniuses who run them that anybody would be arriving by car. The result is that most colleges have approx. one parking space per 150 students, which means that many students spend their entire college careers cruising around looking for a legal spot. Many students are forced to park illegally and receive parking tickets, which at your top Ivy League schools can cost $5,000 per violation. So when you and your child interview at a prospective college, be sure to ask the interviewer probing questions such as: "How many parking spaces does this college have?" "Where do you park?" "Can my child park in your space when you're not conducting interviews?"

4. Social life: College is not just about parking. College is also a place where young people make the transition form immaturity to adulthood via a process of forming long-term social bonds with other young people and then, later in the evening, getting drunk and possibly dropping large objects such as pianos off the roofs of tall buildings. This process occurs most readily at colleges with an active fraternity and sorority system. To determine whether a specific college has an active Greek system, visit the campus on a Saturday night and look for badly maintained buildings with large Greek letters painted on them and young men urinating out the windows.