You should always go to a school that will cost less than your yearly income. For example if someone is choosing between a 20,000 a year school and a 50,000 a year they should check if their yearly income is less or more than the school. You should also look for scholarships and grants that will decrease your tuition because that decreases any possible debt you might pay.
For a PBL project in Personal Finance, we are choosing careers based on the Naviance career path finder and budgeting. To start, we are finding colleges and figuring out which would be the best option for our family income. Then we "go" to college and pick a college that would have less final tuition than our careers. After that, we "bought" a house and budgeted based on our careers, location(city), and number of people living in the house