The final exam came in the mail exactly a week before Katie was to graduate from a prestigious institution of higher learning. To protect its privacy, I will identify it only as a university in Boston whose mascot is a dog, which is what parents have to work like to afford to send their children there.

The exam, a take-home test that was addressed to my daughter but was sent to my wife and me, because colleges know that students have even less money than their parents, involved advanced mathematics. The last question, based on a yearly tuition of $35,000, which otherwise would be frittered away on such luxuries as food and shelter, was as follows: "A reminder: Your student account balance must be resolved in order that any diploma(s), transcript(s) and/or other certifications of academic records may be issued. Please send your payment now to assure that your balance is resolved. Amount due: $4,635.00."

The test wasn’t multiple choice. It was no choice. Pay up or your kid doesn’t graduate. I looked at the bottom of the page, expecting to see the signature of Vito Corleone.

This made me reconsider bank robbery. But parents of college students should dismiss this idea, as I did four years ago, because no bank in the United States has enough money in its vault to pay for your child’s college education.

That is why I think the federal government should adopt what I call the Reverse Education Plan. This plan, which I have been touting since my kids were kids, is based on the long-held scientific belief that a person’s greatest capacity for learning is when he or she is a toddler.

My proposal: Send children to college first. That way, they could get a university degree right off the bat. Then they could work their way down through the educational system until, in their final year, they would go to kindergarten, where they could play "Simon Says" and learn how to get along with others just prior to becoming legal adults.

Under this system, parents wouldn’t have to wait 18 years for the cost of a college education to skyrocket to the point where it rivaled the gross national product of Finland. True, they wouldn’t have time to save, either. Then again, if you lived to be 100, which at this rate is extremely unlikely, you couldn’t save that much money.

Here’s my advice: Don’t even bother saving for college. This contradicts everything the experts say, but the experts can afford to send their children to college because they are paid a lot of money to tell other people to save enough money to pay for college. Don’t believe them. It can’t be done.

What can parents do to prepare for this financial challenge? They should, on a daily or even hourly basis, impart to their children these gentle words of wisdom: GET OFF THE PHONE!

From the time they start nursery school until the day they graduate from high school, the vast majority of kids, boys as well as girls, spend approximately 98 percent of their nonschool waking hours gabbing on the telephone. Parents should tell them, even if it means calling them up on another line, that they would be better off spending their time studying because if they don’t study they will never get into college and will have to settle for low-paying, dead-end jobs that entail asking other people if they want French fries.

If this shameless ploy works well enough, your children will qualify for scholarships and you will receive financial aid, which means that the budding scholars will actually be admitted to college before you have to start paying for it. The down side is that if you die before the loans are paid off, there are heavy penalties, so it pays to stay alive. See your doctor. If he says the strain of paying for college is too much on your heart, get a second opinion. But don’t expect your HMO to cover it.

Along the way, you will periodically receive little surprises such as the one my wife and I got the week before Katie was supposed to graduate. Fortunately, it all worked out (we owed only $1,000, so the mortgage was late) and we were able to attend the graduation ceremony without being accompanied by sheriffs.

Even though I didn’t get a diploma, I know my economics degree will come in handy: My younger daughter still has two years of college to go.