To make sure your college-bound child doesn't graduate with a B.A. in credit-card debt, follow these rules

After years of saving for college (or scrambling at the last minute to come up with the dough), you've mailed the check for the first semester and are ready to pack your budding scholar off to school. Your college money worries are over.

Not so fast, Mom and Dad. The real financial aid crisis may just be starting. After years of spending under your watchful eye, your child is heading off into uncharted, unsupervised economic territory, marked by unexpected expenses, easy access to credit cards and near-infinite temptations to squander money. It all adds up to perfect conditions for financial trouble--misadventures that often climax in phone calls home begging for a bailout. "I see students all the time who max out their credit cards, spend all their college aid, run out of money and are looking for emergency loans--and it's only mid-semester," says Dorothy Bagwell, a Texas Tech professor who directs a peer-to-peer personal-finance program at the university.

This won't happen to your kid, of course--at least not if you run through some basics about managing money and ground rules about spending, credit and the limits of parental aid before he sets foot on campus. This guide should help.

Do Some Home Schooling
In an ideal world, you would have been teaching your children the rudiments of personal finance from the time they were small, giving them an allowance to build budgeting and saving skills, helping them distinguish between needs and wants and, as they got older, imparting technical expertise, like how to balance a checkbook. At the least, teenagers ought to get a fixed weekly amount to buy their own food, entertainment and clothing, so they get used to living on a budget while still at home. "If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college," says John Gardner, a senior fellow at the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience, which focuses on freshman life.

But maybe your child is enrolling at State U. this month and all you have time for is a crash course on the way to school. Lesson 1: Don't spend more money than you have. Lesson 2: Divide spending into needs (say, quarters for the laundry machine) and wants ($1,800 for a spring break trip to Florida). Lesson 3: Don't pay for the wants unless you can cover the needs.

Get a Grip on Costs
Part of your challenge as a parent is figuring out just how much money your newly minted college student will really need for campus living expenses--and how much of that total should come from your wallet. While every school publishes its tuition, room and board and other fixed fees, it's harder to get a handle on the myriad other expenses that pop up.

Books and supplies, for instance, will likely cost more than $850 a year. Health insurance, if your child needs it, could run $1,300. Put line items in the budget for clothing, phone and toiletries, as well as a computer, dorm room decor, entertainment, transportation and meals not on the dining plan. If your child will have a car, figure in the cost of campus permits, plus insurance, gas and maintenance. All told, you're probably looking at a couple of thousand dollars a year or more on top of the college's sticker price.

The big question: Who pays for what? Often the most practical solution is to decide on a general amount you will provide for living expenses--a number that reflects actual costs, your financial resources and your philosophy about your kid's responsibility for paying part of her own way. Then clarify with your child the bills you expect her to shoulder.

For example, when Pamela and Glenn Jenkins of Montclair, N.J. sent their daughter Tiffany to Howard University last fall, they gave her a $150-a-month allowance and agreed to cover the $30 a month to keep her cell phone on their family billing plan. But when Tiffany, 19, wanted a new phone and upgraded service, her parents told her that she'd have to pay the $30-a-month difference.

To hold up their end of the bargain, many students will need to get a summer job or a part-time job at school. Having to work for what they want is a good financial lesson--up to a point. Jobs that require more than 15 hours a week interfere with academic work, studies suggest. Certain jobs, though, can pay off in more ways than one. For Liz Seely, 23, a part-time job in the admissions office at Tulane as an undergrad led to a full-time job as an admissions counselor after graduation.