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Today's show featured "Best Of Clark" repeats from recent shows

We've had a train wreck in higher education with the cost of tuition going up way beyond the rate of inflation. The increases have been extraordinary because colleges are usually semi-closed institutions that are not affected by capitalism.

But now even wealthy families can't always afford college for their children. So Harvard and other elite schools have developed new sliding scales for tuition based on family income. Harvard's income cutoff is $180K/year, which would cover 95 percent of all families in the United States.

Families won't be expected to pay more than 10 percent of their income regardless of overall tuition costs. The bulk of the costs will be paid by the school's huge endowment funds.

The top 5 percent of Americans will still have to pay big bucks to go to school, but the idea is that top schools shouldn't be just for the filthy rich. Princeton, Penn, Swarthmore, Dartmouth and Duke are also doing these sliding scale plans.

It used to be that you couldn't go to an elite school without scholarships. The only alternative was to borrow oneself into oblivion.

We've had calls from people with more than $100K in student loan debt, which is an incredible handcuff as your start your professional life. Also, many of the traditional scholarships were red light/green light based on your income.

This new model is more like having a rheostat in your home that gently adjusts between the two extremes.

Clark is fond of saying that he's not thrifty, he's downright cheap. But there are some lines he won't cross. For example, he will not bunk with a stranger he's never met.

Yet his responsibility on this show is to bring you ideas to save you money. So if the shoe fits, wear it. CouchSurfing.com is a site that allows people to meet others around the world and stay at their homes. It's like crashing at a friend's pad, but you don't know the friend!

This site -- with its MySpace-like interface -- makes hostels seem expensive. Clark admits he wouldn't have done this even in his young, mostly broke days.

Show staffers Joel and Kim have been having animated discussions about the possible dangers of CouchSurfing.com. Joel says he has stayed with people he didn't know before, but he didn't meet them through CouchSurfing.com. He does, however, tentatively have plans to try out this site and see how the experience goes.

Kim, meanwhile, found an article on ABC News that reports CouchSurfing.com has been around for 5 years and only had one minor safety incident in all that time. While it is not a dating site, the article also reports that there is one known baby that's come about as a result of a CouchSurfing.com connection.

We track the calls that come into our show and the Consumer Action Center. There's been a shift during the last 30 days from calls about debt and credit questions to calls about the housing market. About 35 percent of your questions now deal with this latter topic.

In some of the most speculative markets in the country, a much larger percentage of homes than previously thought were owned by speculators who never intended to live in them. This is referred to as occupancy fraud.

What happens when these homes go into foreclosure? Usually, an increase in foreclosures equals an increase in demand for rentals. As people get displaced, they have to have to go somewhere. But in this case, the normal cycle of displaced demand is upset because the foreclosed houses were ghost residences.

The end result is that housing recovery in spec-heavy markets will take longer to happen and the decline in values could be deeper than anticipated. The Wall Street Journal reports that Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and Florida will be hardest hit by this trend.

Meanwhile, homes in Michigan and Ohio are very inexpensive, but for good reason. Both states have declining job markets. Sure you can steal a deal, but where will you work?

Some builders have responded by offering price protection. Always remember that housing is cyclical and will recover. What makes the occupancy fraud scenario different is the combination of spec building in oversupply and the dangerous lending that fueled it. So it's going to take longer to work off the excess in many places.

People are buying sub-compacts vehicles like crazy these days. Clark loves to ride around in sub-compacts when he's overseas in Asia. Foreign markets are all about the economy of packing as many people into a vehicle as possible.

For example, Clark's Scion XB seats about 5 people over here, while 12 people will squeeze into the same vehicle over in Japan. Even high-end manufacturers like BMW and Mercedes are getting into the sub-compact market with their 1 Series and SmartCar brands, respectively.

Because of the sub-compact sales frenzy, you may now be able to buy one size larger for less than you would pay for a sub-compact. The fuel economy losses in going bigger may only be a couple hundred bucks a year.

Even Clark who is obsessed with dinky cars knows there's more comfort in compacts like a Toyota Corolla. While Clark has pre-ordered the SmartCar, he may still decide to go with a compact instead.

Dinky-mobiles deprecate at a faster rate than compact cars. Plus, the additional fuel economy they give may not offer you as much bang for your buck as you'd get by stealing a deal on a compact.