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It's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application — and financial aid — process that looms ahead.

Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation spans about 20 years, others still have kids at home. So how should boomers plan to pay for school when, on average, students graduate from college in the U.S. with $25,000 in debt?

Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance for The New York Times, tells Morning Edition's David Greene about planning strategies and pitfalls to avoid.

Think about college costs in chunks.

"It's something I picked up from Kevin McKinley, who runs a financial planning practice in Wisconsin. His basic insight is that you should divide it in chunks. He was thinking about the $60,000/all-in four-year cost. He basically looked at it like this: Think about saving $20,000 before the kid starts, which is a reasonably easy thing to do if you do it over 18 years. Then spend $20,000 out of your current earnings during the time that your child is in college. It might mean some sacrifices — some very careful budgeting, a lot of rice and beans on the table — but it's doable. And then borrow $20,000. When you start to divide it into chunks, it starts to seem at least within the realm of the possible."

Your kid has been admitted to an expensive private school? Time to get real.

Need planning help?

Learn more about average college costs.

More on student loans.

Not touring colleges quite yet? Figure out how much school will cost when it's your child's time.

When President Obama on Wednesday unveils his blueprint for the government's 2014 budget, he'll offer lots of ideas for changes in taxes and spending.

But the proposal likely to grab the most attention will be the one dealing with cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. Many economists would applaud a change in the way Social Security officials measure inflation, but many older Americans may hiss, fearing a new formula will cut their benefits.

If Congress were to approve it, the change would directly affect the wallets of current — as well as future — recipients of Social Security.

So what is this different formula? Here are some answers about the politically charged proposal that would affect nearly all Americans who are — or plan to be — retired.

How does the Social Security Administration calculate inflation now?

Government officials know that rising consumer prices can erode the buying power of Social Security checks. So each year, they consider whether to provide a cost-of-living adjustment to keep incomes in line with consumer prices.

Their annual decision is based on any changes in prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, prepared by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. As this year began, the nearly 62 million Americans receiving Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits saw their checks go up by 1.7 percent to keep pace with the rise in the CPI.

Is the CPI a good measure of inflation?

Many economists say the CPI is not a good way to measure what people actually are spending at the store because it doesn't take into account the common-sense decisions routinely made by shoppers.

For example, if the price of blueberries were to go up, you might not buy them. Instead, you'll pick up the strawberries that are on sale. When the price of beef is high, you'll get the pork roast. The thing that matters to your budget is the total cost you pay for all of your groceries when you get to the checkout register, not what any one item costs separately.

So how would the White House change the measure for determining any cost-of-living adjustments?

Assuming that Obama does what political pundits predict, he will propose that Social Security administrators start using a different inflation measure, known as the "chained CPI." The Bureau of Labor Statistics invented this measure in 2002 to reflect how people react to price increases by using substitution, such as switching from expensive beef to cheaper pork.

What would it mean for Social Security recipients if the administration were to use the chained CPI measure to calculate benefits?

Economists say it would restrain the growth in cost-of-living-adjustments. At first, the changes would seem small because the chained CPI is usually only about a 0.25 percentage point lower than the CPI. In other words, if the CPI were to rise 2 percent, the chained CPI would show a 1.75 percent increase.

But the trimmed growth in benefits would compound over time and save the government a lot of money over coming years. In fact, the change would save Social Security nearly $130 billion in just the first decade, the Obama administration estimates.

Of course, if the government were to start putting smaller raises into Social Security checks, then recipients would be getting less money in their pockets. "It's much more than a technical fix; it is a reduction in benefits," Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told NPR.

So why would Obama support this change? Don't Democrats always go to the mat to protect Social Security?

Typically, Democrats vigorously defend the existing structure for Social Security, and a number of them are strongly opposed to switching to the chained CPI.

But many lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — are worried that the coming waves of retiring baby boomers will put too great of a financial strain on the system that supports retirees. They are looking for ways to reduce the cost of Social Security without radically restructuring the popular program.

And Obama has said he wants to reduce federal deficit spending by nearly $2 trillion over the coming decade.

White House spokesman Jay Carney has told reporters that to achieve that fiscal goal, Obama would include the inflation-calculation change in his budget — but only if that concession were paired with higher tax revenues, particularly for the wealthy. And Obama wants special protections written into the law for the oldest and poorest seniors.

"It's not the president's ideal approach, but it is a serious compromise proposition that demonstrates that he wants to get things done" in terms of reaching a compromise with deficit hawks, Carney said.

Obama's new budget, which is subject to congressional debate and approval, would take effect Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

Would the chained CPI measure only be used to cut benefits?

No, it could be used to boost revenues as well. That's because many parts of the federal tax code, such as tax brackets and standard deductions, are adjusted annually for inflation, based on the CPI reading. But the White House wants to use the alternative benchmark. Using the chained CPI when setting the tax code would raise an additional $124 billion of tax revenue through 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Beer lovers might be alarmed to hear that beer can pick up small amounts of arsenic as it's filtered to be sparkly clear.

But researchers in Germany reported Sunday that they've found arsenic in hundreds of samples of beer, some at levels more than twice that allowed in drinking water.

When we checked in with experts about arsenic and the filtering process, which is also widely used in the wine industry, they weren't too surprised. That's because the filtering agent in question, diatomaceous earth, is a mined natural product that contains iron and other metals.

"We already knew that," says Roger Boulton, a professor in enology at the University of California, Davis. "The levels shouldn't be alarming, because it's the kind of thing you see in dust or air."

One reason that chemists are now discovering arsenic in beer is that testing methods are much more precise than in decades past, Boulton says, detecting low levels of naturally occurring elements that have always been in food products.

Still, the prospect of arsenic in a frosty lager or a rich chardonnay does beg for further exploration.

It turns out that any beer or wine that's clear has been filtered to strain out plant matter, yeast and anything else that would leave a drink looking unappealingly cloudy.

"It's really there for aesthetics," says Tom Shellhammer, a professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University. "People in general will make positive quality associations with clearer beverages."

There are exceptions, he says, like a cloudy Hefeweizen beer. But the notion of a cloudy pinot grigio does lack appeal. "For many beer and wine producers," he says, "clarity is a clear performance indicator."

For centuries, the filter of choice for wine and beer has been diatomaceous earth. It's a beige powder made up of the skeletons of diatoms, tiny algae that lived in oceans many moons ago. Because the diatom fossils have lots of minute holes, they do a great job of filtering liquids — from swimming pool water to pricey champagne.

Arsenic in beer hit the news this week when Mehmet Coelhan, a researcher at the Weihenstephan research center at the Technical University of Munich, reported at a meeting of the American Chemical Society that many of the nearly 360 beers tested in Germany had trace amounts of arsenic.

A few were found to have more than 25 parts per billion of arsenic. That's twice the 10 parts per billion standard for drinking water in the United States.

Germany is proud of its Reinheitsgebot, a 16th-century purity law that demands that beer can be made of only water, hops and malt. Coelhan and his fellow chemists do a lot of work analyzing water and other ingredients for the German beer industry, so they know arsenic wasn't in the water or malt.

But they did find it in the diatomaceous earth. "We analyzed kieselguhr," Coelhan told a news conference at the ACS meeting in New Orleans on April 7, using the German word for diatomaceous earth. "We found high concentrations of extractable arsenic."

But people don't drink as much beer as they do water (or they shouldn't), and there's no U.S. or European standard for arsenic in foods. That has become an issue with arsenic in rice, which has been found in some products in the United States, including toddler formula and energy bars. So there's no way of knowing if there's enough arsenic in beer to pose a health risk.

The German researchers' findings square with a much smaller 2008 study of Italian beers, which found similar levels in some brews, as well as cadmium and lead, which are also poisonous. A few other studies have found arsenic in wine.

The wine industry has been moving away from using diatomaceous earth for decades, says John Giannini, a lecturer and vintner for the University of California, Fresno — not because it contains arsenic, but because it contains silica, so breathing it "can do damage to your lungs," he says. He has switched largely to cellulose-fiber filters to reduce the risk to students.

The downside, Giannini says, is that the cellulose can give the wine a bit of a papery taste. "What I'm doing is blending the two, to minimize the paper taste and minimize the use of DE."

Other options for filtering wine and beer include polyethylene filters, centrifuges and cross-flow filtration, which doesn't use a filter medium at all.

Washing diatomaceous earth before use reduced the amount of arsenic it released, Coelhan says, but that method hasn't been tested commercially.

Indeed, scientists have some work to do to find out if diatomaceous earth really is causing problems with arsenic in beer and wine.

"The proper study would be to compare unfiltered beer to filtered beer, beer filtered using diatomaceous earth, beer filtered using perlite, beer filtered using cross-flow filtration," says Charlie Bamforth, a professor of brewing science at the University of California, Davis. He's skeptical that diatomaceous earth could be causing troubling levels of contamination.

Abandoning diatomaceous earth altogether won't guarantee there's no arsenic or other heavy metals in beverages, UC Davis wine expert and chemical engineer Boulton told The Salt. "The sense that if you didn't use diatomaceous earth, there would be no heavy metals in beer at all is a little out of touch with nature."