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With the same passion, smarts, and humor that infuses his personal finance column in The New York Times, Ron Lieber’s latest book, The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make, offers families a much-needed guide to help them navigate this difficult and often confusing journey that has only been compounded by a global pandemic and the resulting chaos in higher education. Lieber explains who pays what, and why, and how the financial aid system got so complicated. He also pulls the curtain back on merit aid, a complicated and often opaque form of tuition discounting that most colleges now use to compete with their peers.

In his 2020 best-selling book Who Gets In and Why, named among the 100 Notable Books of the year by The New York Times, award-winning journalist Jeff Selingo shares what he learned from months inside the college admission process. Most of us probably believe that this process is about merit, grades, and SAT scores, rewarding the best students, but Selingo presents a more complicated truth, showing that who gets in is more frequently about the college’s agenda than about the applicant. In a world where thousands of equally qualified students vie for a fixed number of spots at elite institutions, admissions officers often make split-second decisions based on a variety of factors—including whether a student will enroll if accepted.

Lieber and Selingo will talk with Andrea Mondragón, the Joan Feitler ’49 Co-Director of College Counseling at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago since 2015.