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It is that time of the year when college students across the country begin making the long and arduous college admissions process. It's also the time when California personal bankruptcy attorneys find students making one of the biggest and most impactful financial decisions of their lives - the decision to take a loan to pay for college. This year, the feds have launched a new tool to help students and their families figure out the financing plan that is best suited to them.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched a beta version of the Financial Aid Comparison Shopper. According to the Consumer Financial Education Bureau, this bill is meant to be an interactive online tool that can help students and their families compare financing schemes for college education.

What the Financial Aid Comparison Shopper does is help students make proper comparisons of different loan schemes, and choose the one that suits their needs as well as their long-term financial future best.

The Financial Aid Comparison Shopper currently has more than 7,500 institutions in its database. These include not just private colleges, but also vocational schools as well as state and private colleges.

The database gives you a single portal on which you can access data from thousands of institutions, and use it to make a decision. The database can also help you work out the monthly loan payments. That makes it easy to compare your financial burden based on the different colleges.

The feds have recently been investing a lot of time and effort in helping students navigate the minefield that is college debt. Those efforts are based on fears that the student loan crisis is the next major financial crisis that will rock the economy. Currently, student debt in the U.S. is at the $1 trillion mark, and counting.

The National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys recently released a report into the burgeoning problem of student debt in the country. The report titled The Student Loan Debt Bomb: America's Next Mortgage-Style Economic Crisis?’ contains several findings that are no surprise to any California bankruptcy attorney. However, consumers may be unaware of exactly how widespread the problem has become.

As the report indicates, it's not just college students who are struggling with massive debt. Much of the debt is now being carried by parents who took loans for their college-age students. Loans to parents for the education of their children have increased by 75% since the 2005-2006 academic year.

According to data, federally backed educational loans given to parents comprise up to 10%, or $100 billion of the $1 trillion that is currently outstanding in student loans. Parents now hold an average of $34,000 in student debt, and over a ten-year period, that figure could rise to about $40,000. Among students who graduated in 2010, approximately 17% had parents who got loans for their children.

Another interesting fact that emerged in the report is that borrowing is up not just for the below-24 age group, but also for the 35 to 49 age group. In fact, borrowing has grown substantially for this age group, and this is probably an indication that during a recession, many mid-level professionals had to go back to college to bolster their employment and promotion prospects.

California bankruptcy lawyers note, the report also found that loan delinquency is widespread. Out of the class of 2005 students who began paying back their loans after they graduated, about a quarter became delinquent at some point in time, and about 15% defaulted on their loans. On government loans, the default rate was high as 20%.