For the record, I’m not American nor live in the US, but I have a 19-year-old son who started attending the University of Chicago this year, studying economics. Just the tuition itself is $70k. My husband and I are lucky enough to be able to afford it - I still believe it’s an outrageous amount of money to attend college.
That’s good. I’m glad there are ways for people to stay debt free or as debt free as possible. Since I always see student debt being a very big issue in the US in the news.
My undergraduate tuition at a state public university is under 10k a year. I was severely injured in the military though, so the government pays my bill.
What you see in the news is the result of predatory practices and people not being able to use their degrees in a profitable way. There’s a lot of jokes about philosophy programs and art history degrees being a pipeline to working in fast food, because often the only way to use those degrees is to get more education (more loans) so you can teach the subject.
The biggest issues I think comes from the facts that A) there are a handful of very predatory schools with huge inter/national outreach programmes and B) highschool students are pressured into choosing their college path before graduating HS, when they’re still a kid.
The kids don’t know how to actually evaluate their options and end up picking the big, expensive schools just off brand recognition alone. Lots of people fell for this trap and graduated with degrees that weren’t very competitive to state degrees and cost 2-10x more.
I think the next 10 years are going to see students’ debt at graduation decrease as community college enrollment keeps going up and the stigma of “community college” education, which was a big deterrant for a long time, goes away.