Made my last student loan payment at 40 as well. Got my computer engineering degree in 99 from UIUC and since my parents paid a substantial portion of my costs,

Made my last student loan payment at 40 as well. Got my computer engineering degree in 99 from UIUC and since my parents paid a substantial portion of my costs, I "only" had about $25,000 in student loans (equivalent to about $50,000 in today's dollars) with about $350/mo payment ($700/mo today). Starting salary for an engineer was $60k, so there have been effectively no raises for the middle class for my generation or younger. Which means whoever reads this is going to be paying 2-4 times as much as I was, even with a degree from an affordable state school like I went to. I also dorked around a lot and basically wasted my 20s on trying to win the internet lottery. All that said, I strongly disagree with most assessments of why college is so expensive. I feel that the real reason is that it coincides with the decline of the US middle class, starting around 1980 and Reaganomics. We don't make anything useful anymore. We don't automate the real burdens in people's lives, things like necessity or health. We just chase get rich schemes to do as little work as possible. So the rest of the world is eating our lunch now. You want to fix the cost of college? Go back to pre-1980. Make it government funded, build more darn campuses so everyone can go (or at the very least get trained in a trade), and do a jubilee on all student loan debt effective immediately. It's how they do it on Star Trek. That's the future. Anything short of that is a bunch of unamerican hogwash to privatize everything we used to hold dear and make someone rich on your backs. Disclaimer: this is one humble opinion from someone who paid his dues and is sick of the I've got mine mentality pushing the US to the brink of corporate fascism. I don't want anyone else to squander their potential making rent like I did.