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This is the time of year when students are being shocked about the sticker price of college tuition. But there is a lot more than price that they ought to be pondering when they select their college and their courses. Here is some timely advice:

1. Pick your courses carefully. Since you are paying an enormous hourly rate for classes, don't waste your education dollar on trivial, non-academic courses, or rap sessions on highly specialized subjects of no interest to anyone other than a professor who is trying to meet academia's "publish or perish" rule.

2. Take engineering, math and science. You learn things that are true, not things that are false and must be unlearned later.

3. Take courses taught by qualified professors rather than by Teaching Assistants. T.A.s are underpaid graduate students who know very little more than you do.

4. Avoid taking advice from college counselors. They are working for the college and are looking out for the financial interests of the college, not the students.

5. Counselors frequently channel students into a schedule that ends up requiring five or six years to get a bachelor's degree. Because of federal grants and loans, it is profitable for the college to keep you on campus an extra year or two, but your degree isn't worth a penny more even if it costs you 25 or 50 percent more.

6. Don't believe everything you read in the college catalogue. Many college catalogues are dishonest advertising because up to half of the courses listed are not really offered, or may be offered only once in ten years.

7. Don't think that the title of the course is a guarantee of what the course really covers. So much of the college curriculum has been politicized by the liberals and the feminists.

   The title may indicate a traditional course of study, but the famous DWEMS (Dead White European Males), who wrote the great books of Western civilization, may have been censored out and replaced with third-rate feminist and minority writers who paint themselves as victims and attack Western civilization as sexist, racist, and oppressive.

8. Make sure you don't get trapped in a course taught by an instructor who doesn't speak intelligible English. Many important and necessary college courses -- especially in math and science -- are taught by immigrants who can barely speak English.

9. If you take Economics, seek out the professors who teach the successful free-market economics according to Adam Smith or Milton Friedman. It may be hard, but try to avoid professors who teach the failed economics of socialism.

10. If you take English, beware of professors who believe in Deconstructionism. That means there is no such thing as intrinsic merit in a work of literature and that what matters is what you think about the author, not what he actually wrote.

11. Avoid women's studies. They are usually just propaganda courses for radical feminist, and often lesbian, ideology and behavior. Avoid courses that betray their bias and nonacademic content by including in their titles words such as Feminist, Gay, Lesbian, Sex, Gender, Race, or Ethnicity.

12. Seek out courses (if any) that teach the true history and achievements of Western civilization and the United States rather than Multiculturalism, which is a code word for downgrading America as the worst of all cultures. Avoid instructors who impose their anti-Christian bias by demanding that students replace B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini) with B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era).

13. Look out for crime on campus. Most colleges conceal the actual amount of crime that takes place on college campuses.

14. Prepare yourself morally and psychologically for freshman orientation, which may be a culture shock. You might be asked to role-play what it's like to be gay, or told that if you object to coed bathrooms you need psychological counseling.

15. Seek out companions who share your values and beliefs, and join a conservative student support group. If your roommate is on drugs, has sex in your room, or engages in obnoxious behavior that interferes with your studying, demand a change.

16. Don't think you can get into a first-rate college because you are smart. Michele Hernandez, Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth, says you have a better chance of being admitted if you are from a ghetto, a barrio or an Indian reservation, or if you can be someone they can feel sorry for, even if your academic qualifications are lower.

17. Avoid the more than three hundred colleges that have speech codes. Speech codes are Political Correctness run amuck and an offense against the First Amendment.

18. Try to avoid paying student activity fees. They are usually controlled by student leftists and used to promote leftwing causes, speakers, publications, and politics.

19. Don't think you are getting a good education just because you get good grades, because the grading practices are corrupt. It's called Grade Inflation, and it's an insidious system designed to make you feel good about the exorbitant tuition you are paying.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

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