The effect of college costs on teenagers’ engagement in risky behavior depends on two major factors. The first is the extent to which teenagers are forward-looking in their behavior. If teenage decision-making is not motivated in part by expectations of the future, then factors that affect teens tomorrow (e.g. the price of college) should have no effect on behavior today. The economic literature on this subject is sparse, but recent work by Coppejans, Gilleskie, Sieg, and Strumpf [2007] shows that teens’ current smoking decisions are influenced by expected future cigarette price volatility. This is inconsistent with the notion that teenagers are merely myopic consumers of cigarettes. Other work has examined youths’ subjective expectations (and outcomes associated with those expectations), such as those available in the NLSY97, to gauge forward-lookingness. Teenagers in the NLSY97 appear to be overly optimistic when it comes to forecasting their future college outcomes (Reynolds and Pemberton, 2001; Walker, 2001). Nevertheless, as I discuss later in the paper, NLSY97 teens’ expectations are highly predictive of future schooling attainment, even after accounting for a variety of individual and family characteristics. Moreover, two-year college tuition rates have similar effects on youths’ college expectations and outcomes, indicating that it is plausible that college costs have an effect on teenage behavior.