Giving Compass' Take:

• Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic interviews anthropologist professor Caitlin Zaloom about what the system of paying for college is doing to families, as well as what might make higher education less financially fraught.

• How can we simplify the financial aid process? What can funders do to help colleges in this effort?

• Here's how schools and startups are hacking college affordability. 

The story of the rising cost of college in America is often told through numbers, with references to runaway tuition prices and the ever-growing pile of outstanding student debt.

The personal toll these trends have taken is hard to convey, but the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom does so in her new book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, which documents how the price of a college education has forced many middle-class families to rearrange their priorities, finances, and lives.

In Indebted, Zaloom, a professor at New York University, draws on some 160 interviews she did with families who are taking on debt to pay for college, mixing in history of education policy and analysis of the financial morass students and their loved ones must navigate—including a close reading of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form and the concept of family it promotes.

Read the full article about the price of college by Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic.