I asked my colleague, Sandi Kirshner, our chief of public policy for higher education issues, what she thought about this question. She had some great insights, which she posted on our FWD education blog.

Key among them were these:

Students must become smart about financial aid and college financing well prior to arriving at college. The U.S. Department of Education now requires all colleges to post on their websites a net price calculator which will give students and their families early and individualized estimates of how much it will cost them to attend schools they are interested in. The Institute for College Access and Success is a good resource for an early analysis of the net price calculators created by 16 “early adopter” colleges who went live with their calculators in January 2011.

And we also ought to consider making a financial literacy course part of high school course requirements. Utah, Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia now require high school students to take a one-semester course on personal finance.

Our public agencies can facilitate better financial literacy, but at the end of the day, we all must be smart consumers, too.

Before we engage in a discussion about the value of college and how to pay for it, it’s important to remind ourselves that we need a lot more people with postsecondary degrees and credentials. There is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of new jobs require advanced skills. That reality makes postsecondary education the new gateway to the middle class in America, which means that people will likely be poor in the future if they choose not to complete some form of postsecondary education. It’s that simple.

That said, the student loan debt issue is very serious and it’s important for us to explore new ways to address the cost and price of higher education. About one in five adults has student loan debt. This is a challenge with truly national implications. So the President’s initiative is a step in the right direction, and we should applaud that. But it won’t solve the long-term and increasingly onerous increase we’ve seen in rising college prices. The solution will only come through a combination of increased individual responsibility and sound public policy.

Students (and their parents) should first seek out all of the information that they can regarding the higher education funding options that are available to them. There are plenty of government grants, private scholarships, and work-study programs available, even in these tight economic times. Not everyone faces the dramatically high prices that the top-tier institutions charge, and which garner the majority of media attention. And not all loans are the same. The income-based repayment options, various deferments, and other strategies available—especially for federal loans—can help individuals reduce their own debt and risks of borrowing.

Beyond these individual steps, we must also look at other ways to address the sizeable challenges of college affordability. We need to re-think the best financial solutions to delivering higher-quality higher education to a lot more Americans, and those solutions should not include having students take on ever-increasing amounts of debt.

Much more must be done to ensure affordability if we intend to reach our national higher education attainment goals. The President’s proposal should be seen as a “down payment” on a much broader college affordability plan. There is still a lot of work to be done, by all parties including: colleges and universities, parents and students, states, and the Federal government. Everyone must take responsibility to make wise decisions when it comes to funding higher education, because the economic, social and civic benefits of a better educated population impact all of us.

President Obama’s decision to implement new income based repayment standards on an expedited basis is a welcome move for students. Until this announcement, the income-based repayment program has lacked sufficient press coverage and servicer support. Only about 450,000 borrowers are taking advantage of the option to date, when estimates show 1.6 million borrowers are eligible. The Administration and U.S. Department of Education should create broader public awareness of the multiple repayment programs for federal student loans (which most borrowers don’t even realize exist), so as to counter the misinformation that there are no alternatives to default. The government needs to get the message out that it has built a system that makes the debt manageable so that student debtors don’t have to put off marriage, home or family, or choose a higher-paying job because their monthly federal student loan payment is too high. Most importantly, they don’t have to default, ruin their credit and pay more in interest and fees.

Additionally, resources and guidance should be extended to student borrowers to help them navigate these complicated programs.

More should also be done to integrate “personal finance 101” into offerings for college students and alumni. The entire student loan process, from knowing before you owe to making smarter repayment decisions, can be used as a Montessori learning-by-doing model to build a good foundation for future financial health. This type of financial education that combines the abstract with the tangible can not only instruct but actually change behavior.

As my 17-year-old son and I toured a major, state university campus this fall, we were surprised by the large, indoor water park on campus, complete with a 3-story slide and 40 person hot tub. And this, we were told, is the smaller of the two university recreational facilities. Earlier in the tour, the chemistry auditorium was cramped, overheated and clearly had not be renovated in decades. Costs and priorities are out of balance in higher education, and students are paying the price with a lifetime of debt. This is not a problem that will be solved by giving students better information about loans.

For decades, our nation has spent money we don't have to finance things we want. Republicans have done it to finance tax breaks and military spending; Democrats to pay for discretionary spending and entitlements. The result is reckless deficit spending that is slowly bringing us to a very dangerous pass.

President Obama came to office pledging that we were done "kicking the can down the road" on this stuff. Well, not so much. His latest ploy is a student lending policy that teaches a new generation of college-goers that government is there to provide free stuff. It used to be that, if you took federal loans, the expectation was that you'd paid them back. (The definition of "loan," after all, entails this whole notion of borrowing and repayment). A couple years ago, the Obama administration decided this was old-fashioned. Now, via income-based repayment (IBR), students could instead limit the loan amount they have to repay Uncle Sam to 15% of their "discretionary" income for 25 years. After that, any remaining obligation would be tacked onto the taxpayers' tab (or really, since we've running deficits as far as we can see, by future taxpayers).

Now, I've no problem with IBR, if it's a break-even proposition and doesn't create yet another new taxpayer subsidy. Unfortunately, that's not the way the Obama administration has pursued it.

Rather, seeing a chance to score additional pander points, the President announced that the obligation would be reduced to 10% of discretionary income for 20 years, with any remaining debt would be forgiven (e.g. paid instead by taxpayers). This was precisely the conern some of us voiced when student lending was nationalized as part of Health Care Reform. We worried it would be tempting for pols to buy the support of borrowers by finding new ways for taxpayers to subsidize borrowers. Me, I'm just waiting for the President to announce-- in October 2012, I suppose-- that he's decided the new repayment rate should be one percent of discretionary income for a year or two. Ahh, nothing says we're "done kicking the can" quite like introducing a new generation to Uncle Sam's gravy train...

Kudos to President Obama for acting to get student debt under control. Kudos to National Journal for raising the issue of paying for college. But I was surprised to search the question for the word “saving” and find not even the word, much less the concept. Even the president barely mentioned saving for college in his Denver speech, and then only in reference to his own family.

I should not have been surprised at either omission. For it has been my experience as president of Dillard University and president and CEO of UNCF that saving for college is one of the last things low- and moderate-income families—families, in other words, who cannot write tuition checks for upwards of $25,000—think about in making college plans, if they think about it at all. Many parents seem to think that between scholarships and loans, paying for college will take care of itself.

It won’t. Even the best need-based scholarships, like UNCF’s own Gates Millennium Scholars Program, require a family contribution. And student loans, as the question notes, can leave students with a crushing burden of debt well into their careers.

Parents who aspire to college for their children—and that should be all parents—need to save for college, and they need to start early. And it is in all of our interests to provide incentives that help them start saving and keep saving.

That is, in fact, the key element in a UNCF program called the Partnership for College Completion (PCC). PCC is a collaboration of UNCF, the KIPP network of charter schools, and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit dedicated to expanding economic opportunity for low-income families and communities. The pilot phase of PCC has been funded by Citibank and the Citi Foundation and is in operation in 27 KIPP schools in Chicago, Houston, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, D.C.

Now beginning its second year, PCC is based on the idea that the road to college does not start in junior or senior year in high school, but much earlier: ideally in pre-school, and no later than middle school. Higher income families know this, and make sure that their kids go to good schools starting early, and that they take the courses that lead to college success. PCC is an effort to replicate that continuous support for students who may attend schools that don’t routinely channel them into college-prep courses, or who may be the first in their families to attend college and thus don’t have the level of guidance and support that others take for granted. PCC builds on the excellent college-oriented education that all KIPP students receive. It includes a scholarship program, which will be administered by UNCF, and an alumni tracking service, to provide support once students get to college

But PCC’s “secret sauce” is its savings program. The program opens a savings account for every participant who enrolls. To incentivize participation, it starts the account off with a seed deposit. And to incentivize participation and regular deposits, it matches student deposits up to $250 every year. The proceeds of the account are applied to college expenses. The most obvious benefit, of course, is the building of an education nest-egg to help pay for tuition, text books, room and board and other costs.

But what makes the PCC savings component so important is the research-documented impact of savings on the likelihood of college attendance. Saving for college gives students and families a stake in a higher education—gives them skin in the game, so to speak. And that dramatically shortens the odds on attending. Research on a previous college-savings program has indicated that students with college savings accounts are four times more likely to go to college. Students with accounts in their own names are seven times more likely to go.

There is much that we need to do for college aspirants from low-income families. We need to give them the good pre-college education that will prepare them for college success. We need to make sure that college prepares them for career and life, and at a cost that more Americans can afford. We need to provide help in paying for college with scholarships and loans.

But as we strive to do all these things for them, we must also empower them to do what they can for themselves—like saving for college. We must do this because they need the money they will save. We must do it because saving will make going to college more likely. And we must do it because an essential part of the education they deserve is to learn to become active participants in their own education and their own lives.