Does thinking about financial aid make your head spin? We here at CampusCompare feel your pain, and we’ve got the cure—our financial aid calculator.

Your math teacher might have tried to get you to stop relying on your calculator, but we hope you’ll use ours as often as you like. You can tote up the bill at your dream school, compare costs at a few different schools, or weigh your options of living at home versus living on campus.

After you try out our calculator, why not take a look at our other nifty tool, What Are My Chances? It can help you figure out the odds of your getting into school; sadly, it won’t help you determine the odds of finding a date for prom.

Have you heard about the tuition stabilization plans that many schools have adopted as part of their quest to make higher education affordable?

Schools such as College of the Holy Cross, University of Miami, and Vanderbilt University are enabling students to prepay anywhere from one to four years’ worth of tuition in order to lock in the current year’s cost.

So if you are entering college this year at a tuition rate of $30,000, you can prepay 60k to 120k and save thousands of dollars resulting from tuition increases over the next four years.

Aww, that’s nice.

Wait a minute. If one had the cash to prepay college tuition, it would seem that one wouldn’t have to worry about saving a few thousand in the long run, right?

So who does tuition stabilization benefit? Certainly not the little people. It does ensure that colleges get up to four years of tuition up front—as well as the assurance that it will retain students for the entire length of their degree program.

Can tuition stabilization even be considered financial aid? What do you think colleges and universities should do to help out instead?

In July, Reisa Resource blogged about loan forgiveness. Here’s a recap: Depending on your chosen career path after college, you might be able to get some of your federal student loans cancelled, or in financial parlance, “forgiven.” Here are some specific ways in which you can shave a few thousand dollars off your college debt:

Volunteer. AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) give their volunteers a considerable break on their student loans. Considerable effort is also required on your part, though, as these organizations require a time commitment of one or two years to achieve eligibility for loan cancellation.

Serve your country. Members of the Army National Guard can receive up to $10,000 towards their student loans through the Student Loan Repayment Program.

Teach. If you have a Perkins loan and are teaching in a school located in a low-income community, you can have a percentage of your loan forgiven through the National Defense Education Act. You are eligible to have 15% of your loan cancelled for the first and second years of employment, 20% for the third and fourth years, and 30% for the fifth year. (You don’t have to be a math teacher to figure out that it all adds to up to the 100% cancellation of your Perkins loan.)

There are other ways of having your loans forgiven, particularly if your work involves underserved communities. It never hurts to ask a financial aid officer about your options.