One of the surprising things to me is that most people do not actually pay the sticker price, many colleges have needs based financial aid that brings it down,

One of the surprising things to me is that most people do not actually pay the sticker price, many colleges have needs based financial aid that brings it down, before even talking about things like Pell grants. From reading the headlines it's easy to think that graduating with 100k in debt is normal, but the average is "only" 37k. And the median is lower still (media loan payments at ages 20-30 are $203 vs average $351[1]). Which basically says to me that the issue with student loans isn't so much how expensive college is in general, it's that we have a segment of the population, like the author falling into a trap where they graduate with far more debt than they should. You're pretty spot on about your comments on state support though, FiveThirtyEight had a good piece on how tuition costs at public universities have largely been due to a decrease in government funding: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m... Coming from Australia it's also a bit odd that so many students move to go to university. Most of the people I knew at university were still living with their parents. Partly this is just the concentration of the population in a few major cities, but I think it's also the general trend of building universities close to population centers, and maybe less strong differentiation between university profile sin different regions. [1]https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/ https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/