I still find the US attitude to college somewhat perplexing (I'm Australian). Australia had free university education until around ~1990 or so when it introduc

I still find the US attitude to college somewhat perplexing (I'm Australian). Australia had free university education until around ~1990 or so when it introduced HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme), which I believe later changed to HELP. The idea of this is that any tuition you receive will incur a cost that will be deducted from your salary (above a certain level) until its repaid. It has interest. Previously you could get a discount by repaying early but I'm told that went away. The key aspects of this system are: - You can't student loans for any expenses. This only covers tuition. I think this is a reform that's needed for the US system. - It isn't a loan. If you don't earn an income you don't pay anything. There's no getting crippled by loan repayments like seems to happen with US student debt. - It's largely impossible for 18 year olds to get into a situation where they owe hundreds of thousands of dollars (I saw a CNN report on millenials once that, as one example, had a young woman who worked as a waitress now who accrued >$100k in debt studying Theatre Arts at NYU). From working for large US tech companies (in the US) I see a prevailing attitude that some people who work for these companies feel like they're underpaid if they can't save up and pay for private college education for each of their children, which 10-20 years in the future, may well be >$500k _each_ (which is just crazy). There are actually lots of good options for getting a college education relatively inexpensively: - ROTC - Resident state college education. This may mean delaying your start a year to establish residency but can pay off big time. UT Austin has an excellent CS program an in-state tuition is quite affordable last time I looked. - Stopping when enough is enough. I see a lot of people getting pretty pointless Masters degrees, for example, which is fine if you can afford it. - Starting at cheaper (even community) colleges and transferring later. You'll miss out on some of the social aspects of the early years of college but your degree will still say Stanford or whatever. I wonder if it's not sending the wrong message to your children that they can go to Yale without paying a cent out of pocket. Like what happens when they can't provide that for their own children? College in the US more than Australia seems to be used as an artificial barrier to entry to a lot of jobs too.