Yesterday morning I watched my oldest child hop on the school bus like an old pro, waving back at the group of parents huddled in the driveway in the eerie, almost-sunrise-but-not-quite, half light of morning. He looked so confident, so self-assured.

It's hard to believe six years ago, he was just a baby learning all those basic life tasks — crawling, walking, talking, running. Even this summer was filled with milestones — first loose teeth and riding without training wheels.

So now he's in first grade and starting his education in earnest. If the first six years of his life are any indication, the next 12 years are going to fly by.

Which leads me to think about college. Gulp. Will we be ready? Financially, I mean? This is an area we haven't given as much thought to as we should. I've been contemplating how much college costs these days and I've come to a conclusion — we'd better get ready.

Many of you may be in the same boat. Or you're watching your grandchildren prepare for college. Or maybe you just completed your degree and are dealing with student loan debt. No matter what, paying for college is an issue that touches most people somewhere along the way. Even if you don't have children, or your college days are a long ago memory, you know that a college education is critical to the health of our economy. We must have a highly skilled workforce if we are to compete in the global marketplace.

Let's face it — college tuition and fees aren't what they used to be. Across the nation, the economy is in a scary state and tuition rates are skyrocketing. We've seen the headlines — “Tuition Rising Faster than Inflation” or “College Tuition to Rise X Percent.”

Meanwhile, worldwide financial turmoil has taken a bite out of the endowments universities depend on to provide scholarships, while a credit crunch makes loans harder to find. Many parents are worrying more about keeping their homes and jobs than saving for a child's higher education. Short-term economic forecasts range from bad to worse.

And here's something alarming I found on the FinAid web site*: “On average, tuition tends to increase about 8 percent per year. An 8 percent college inflation rate means that the cost of college doubles every nine years. For a baby born today, this means that college costs will be more than three times current rates when the child matriculates in college.”

Nationally, tuition and fees at four-year public schools rose 76.3 percent from 2000-01 to 2007-08.

What's going on here? Why does it cost so much to go to college? Where does the money go?

Some answers are obvious — the economy impacts the prices of all kinds of goods, from water and electricity to light bulbs and paper. Some may be a little harder to see. There is such a thing as a Higher Education Price Index, similar to the Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation rates on things that relate just to universities and community colleges. Many of those items relate to personnel.