One of the biggest issues facing graduating seniors these days is just how they'll manage the debt they've accumulated over the previous four years. It's quite a chunk of change for a lot of students. According to The Project on Student Debt, the average 2010 college graduate left school with more than $25,000 in loan debt.

That figure is slightly higher in New England, because of the large number of private liberal arts colleges and the higher cost of public higher education, says Kevin Fudge, an advisor for American Student Assistance, a Boston non profit that helps students and alumni manage debt. You can check out the average debt at Massachusetts colleges here.

How'd we get here? It's partly the higher than inflation cost increases year after year; my students don't believe it when I tell them what I paid for a semester at UMass in the 1970's. But it's also the way aid is distributed.

It's a bittersweet time if your offspring are entering their final semester of college. Sweet, because the end of tuition checks is in sight. Bitter, because your daughter's entering a sketchy employment situation and you have turned her bedroom into your yoga studio and now you may have to give it back. This spring I teach my Launchpad Workshop for graduating seniors in my program at UMass, and here are a few tips I'll be sharing.

"Privacy is highly overrated," a student pronounced after class one day last semester; she was following up on a discussion about the professional costs of exposing oneself too much online.

My first response was: how would you even know it's overrated? You've never experienced it. But when you're an old(er) person working with, and teaching about, technology you're always taking your own temperature. Was she right? Is it passe, or even bad advice to a young person building a career to suggest that you hold back a piece of yourself from the great digital maw? Does privacy matter any more?