I expect to send all of my children to university but they're going to receive much more financial scrutiny than I did regarding the possible future jobs/incomes provided by the degree.
I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
You only end up 100k in the hole if you eschew your perfectly good public in state option. That's part of the reason. Public colleges recruiting at high schools out of state are straight up doing it in bad faith.
> I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
That's actually pretty hard to do if you go to good public university or a reasonably high rated private non-profit university. The latter do have sticker prices that could total to over $100k for an undergraduate degree, but they also tend to have pretty generous non-loan based financial aid.
Getting into hundreds of thousands in student debt usually requires going on to law school or medical school. The average Harvard Law graduate for example in 2022 had $143k of debt. The average Harvard medical graduate had $103k. Harvard is actually unusually low for medical school. The average debt at public medical schools is about 40% higher, and the average debt at other private medical schools is a little higher than that.
Here's average undergraduate debt at graduation for the class of 2022 at a bunch of schools [1].
I've heard of people who could have gotten into a top science or engineering school but didn't even apply because they thought that they could not afford it or would have to take out $100k+ in loans when in fact they would have have been offered either a non-loan aid package or a package with only $20-30k total loans over 4 years.
They knew that there was generous aid to students whose families have sufficiently low income, but just assumed that the threshold was somewhere around the poverty level. It is often much higher than that. At MIT for example students from families with incomes and typical assets under $140k are not charged tuition. $140k household income is 76th percentile in the US. (Household income below $75k, which is 50th percentile gets room and board waived).
The in-state cost of most of the UC's (University of California), including books and room and board, are hovering around $40K per year now. I could easily see someone racking up $100K+ in debt for four years. My kid has ~7 years to go before we have to swallow this, and I'm expecting that figure to be over $200K by the time she goes.
I think frankly it's immoral to the student and the taxpayer that an 18-year-old can go through school and graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt and no realistic way of paying it off.
It's cruel and immoral and must change.