Help your children avoid student debt burden

It’s not so easy being a college kid these days. The job market for recent graduates has been shaky while, at the same time, students are leaving school with more debt than ever before. If you have children who will someday be attending college, should you be worried?

You might indeed have cause for concern. Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards, according to the Federal Bank of New York, the U.S. Department of Education and other sources. For the college class of 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, the average student loan debt was about $26,500,...