Paying for a college education can be daunting, especially as tuition costs rise year after year. While many parents try to start saving for their child’s projected college costs early on, almost two-thirds of parents have no education savings by the time their child is in high school. Whether your own children have just graduated from preschool or high school, it’s not too late to think about college finances.

Now that the economy has taken a turn for the worst, you might be worried that trying to figure out how to pay for your kids’ higher education costs is taking a back seat to meeting mortgage payments, looking for a new job, or just trying to make ends meet.

Fear not – Education.com has published a new special edition just for you: College Financing: Pay for College in Today’s Economy. To put together the ultimate resource on college financing, we enlisted the help of leading college financing expert, Mark Kantrowitz, who is the publisher of the award-winning FinAid and FastWeb websites, and president of MK Consulting, Inc. Denise Daniels, Ph.D. and I also serve as editors of the special edition.

The College Financing special edition features over 30 articles on a variety of topics, including figuring out 529 plans, decoding financial aid forms, finding scholarships, and identifying some creative ways to pay for college. If you’re still tackling your own student debt, the College Financing special edition also offers articles to help you ease the burden of your current student loan payments.

We hope you’ll take some time this summer to read through this collection of college financing articles, and let us know what you think. Or use JustAsk to get your college financing questions answered by the Education.com community of experts, parents, students and others with relevant knowledge or personal experiences to share.

As the summer heats up, we’ll continue expanding the College Financing special edition with more articles and tools, so please keep coming back to learn the latest. You might also spend some time reviewing the other new special edition we’ve recently launched: Going to College to learn how to support your child’s transition to college.

College means more responsibility, more freedom, and more choices for your child than he or she may have ever had before. Being away from home for the first time. Adjusting to dorm life or off-campus housing. Making new friends. Parties and drinking. Learning to balance the new social life with the increased study load. Staying healthy, balancing a tight budget, passing college exams. With so much to consider and manage, making the transition to college can be tricky for students and parents alike!

To help ease this transition, Education.com has launched a new special edition: Going to College, to provide parents and students with authoritative, credible information on a wide range of issues, including health and wellness, personal finance, adjusting to college academics, packing and preparing for college, and surviving the college social scene. There’s also a helpful section just for parents on how to let go while also remaining involved as a source of support in their child’s life during that first year of college.

With over 44 articles already included and more to come later this summer, the Going to College special edition was compiled by the following team of experts:

• Kevin Gaw, Ph.D., the current president of the American College Counseling Association and director of University Career Services at Georgia State University; Kevin is a leader in the college counseling and career services field, and has dedicated his career to helping students make the transition from high school to college and from college to the work-force,

• College Parents of America, the leading national membership association dedicated to advocating and to serving on behalf of current and future college parents

• And multiple members of the Education.com Reference team, including: Jennifer Kirshman, M.Ed., Denise Daniels, Ph.D. and me.

We hope you find this new special edition helpful, and will let us know what you think. You can use JustAsk to get your college-related questions answered by the Education.com community of experts, parents, students and others with relevant knowledge or personal experiences to share. Please also spend some time reviewing the other new special edition we’ve recently launched: College Financing, to learn how to pay for college during hard economic times.