Time to hire Junior a private tutor or get Sally Sue some extra after-school lessons. Whatever you gotta do to get them through high school within the next few years, while the giving is still good. In an attempt to bounce back from bad management and financial ruin, Antioch College — a private, liberal arts school in Yellow Springs, Ohio — is waiving the cost of tuition for all students who enroll in the next three years.

You aren’t moving fast enough. Free tuition. Three years. Time’s a-wastin’.

If you’re brave enough to even attempt to look at the price of college tuition, you’re probably still peeking through a semi-open hand, like the way I watch The Walking Dead. After all, it’s about the same level of scary — maybe even scarier. In 2011, the average cost of life and learning at a typical private school hiked to $42,224. That’s per year. 

What does your teen want to major in in college? Architecture? The arts? Does he or she want a well-rounded humanities or liberal arts degree? If so, bad news: A new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has found that recent college grads with those degrees have some of the highest rates of unemployment: 13.9 percent unemployment for architects just getting out of undergrad institutions, 11.1 percent for those clutching an arts degree, and 9.4 percent for those who majored in the humanities and liberal arts.

Even if your kid is lucky enough to get a job in one of those areas and hold onto it, maybe even collecting a graduate degree along the way, he or she is not looking at a lot of upward potential in terms of salary. Arts majors with graduate degrees earn about $55,000 annually, on average, whereas engineers with graduate degrees pull in about $100,000. Or, you know, more.

So what are you supposed to do?

It hits the press at least once a year, and for a few days, the topical spotlight shines bright on hazing.

Some poor kid, desperate to be inducted into one organization or another, gets beaten senseless or is caught doing something foolish or finds themselves injured — sometimes badly — trying to get through the requirements of membership or just be accepted. This time, it was Florida A&M’s drum major Robert Champion, who died in November after his bandmates found him unresponsive.

In the aftermath, four students have been kicked out of the school and the band’s director, Julian White, has been suspended while administrators at FAMU investigate the incident. It wouldn’t be the first time the band was cited for hazing. 

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1. Some schools turn a blind eye to party-hard students who violate that pesky underage drinking law. Others take it really seriously. Don’t find out the hard way and get kicked out of school and in trouble with the cops. And seriously, there are way too many people walking around with regrets from something they did when they were totally wasted.

2. While we’re on the subject, resist any and every urge to cheat, even if it’s to give someone else the answers. Academic dishonesty is a major offense — right up there with underage drinking by some administrator’s standards — so read your student manual. An honest F is much less risky than a ripped off A.  

Ever since cops started rounding up teenagers involved in an SAT testing scandal on New York's Long Island, I've been thinking about their parents. Were these kids paying someone to take these tests because they were lazy, or did they have moms and dads who pushed them too hard? I'm going on the record right now as a mother: I'd rather my kid bomb the SAT than cheat, and I don't care what that does to her chance at getting into a good school.

Come on people, what exactly does a degree from a "good school" do for our kids? Diddly if they're lying, cheating, conniving scumbags at the end of the day!

My daughter sticks an invisible dagger in my heart every time she declares that she doesn’t like to read. I have no idea how it happened. When I was holed up in the house all big and bulky during my pregnancy, I ate books. Classic books, trash lit, how-to guides, anything I could get my hands on.

When she was a baby, even up until she was a fourth, maybe fifth grader, we read together every night. She loved the Junie B. Jones series, and I even passed down books I used to adore when I was a budding gal like her, like my Sweet Valley High and Fabulous Five collections. In mint condition, if I do say so myself.

Alas, the love of the written word just hasn’t been passed on to Young Harris (insert long, baleful moan from her writer/editor mother). That she can recite every word to “We Found Love” but gives me a long, blank stare when I quote a line from Charles Dickens, even A Christmas Story, makes me feel like I failed the child.

Paying for college has got to be one of the most challenging parts of being a parent these days. My kids aren't even in middle school yet and already I break out into a cold sweat just thinking about it. The luckiest parents I know are the ones who happen to be residents where the state schools are decent. In-state tuition is a fraction of what out-of-state students have to pay.

So it's kind of incredibly lame that there's a group of students in Florida who are being charged out-of-state rates even though they're official Florida residents.

The only difference between these students and those paying in-state prices? The ones being ripped off are the children of illegal aliens.