Every self-help book begins with a view of the problem that it aims to help readers solve. Ron Lieber’s masterly “The Price You Pay for College” announces that problem in its subtitle: “the biggest financial decision your family will ever make.” The book promises to help readers apply to, choose, bargain with and pay for a college — to navigate the enormously expensive, intricate and pressure-filled system that is higher education in the United States today.
Understood as a self-help book, “The Price You Pay for College” represents an extraordinary achievement: It is comprehensive and detailed without being tedious, practical without being banal, impeccably well judged and unusually rigorous. But the main title hints at a sensibility deeper than friendly advice. The terrain the book charts is too treacherous to traverse unscathed, exacting a toll from all who pass through it. Fidelity to genre prevents Lieber from developing this sensibility into a critique that explains what has gone wrong and argues for a better way. To learn to navigate a system is not yet to grasp its causes and consequences, or to know how to change it.
