It's not impossible to have a low debt degree today.
I've worked interesting jobs part-time during the school year and full time during breaks and will graduate without a dime of debt. I've met many students with a similar financial background.
I'd be very interested in the details on how you were able to accomplish this. What kind of part-time job will both pay enough to fund college while being flexible enough to allow for both class time, and leave you with enough mental energy to study and do homework?
I worked through my college education yet still graduated with a modest amount of debt. There were choices I could have made to improve my financial situation, but no amount of penny-pinching would have completely mitigated the debt I would have had to take on, save a rich relative bankrolling me.
I've been very lucky. I don't want to say everyone can get through college without debt, because that simply isn't true. I also was blessed with a good job and some good timing. Mostly it comes down to my university being so inexpensive.
I went to community college first. In community college I found it was really common for people to be doing both full-time school and full-time work. My present university (BYU) also charges very low tuition - almost as cheap as my community college. I've also done some full-time work with part-time summer classes in order to keep my graduation on schedule.
I work for a web analytics consultancy, which has allowed my hours to be somewhat flexible. I started at about $10/hour which was enough to meet my expenses at the time (because I was going to community college while living at my parents). Within a year I was making about double that, which was perfect as it coincided with graduating from community college and moving 2000 miles to university (meaning I had to cover my living expenses). This is because the particular type of consulting we do is quite specialized - if I only got two or three real hours of work done in a week out of 20 hours worked the company was still massively ahead at the hourly rates we charge. The work (mostly coding) is different enough from my major (Economics) that I maintain interest in both.
My major is also taught by professors who apparently all prefer roughly the same schedule for classes. As a result, semester to semester time shifts in my work schedule are minor. I work in the morning and then do some work in the evening.
I won't say everything has been perfect. I don't spend as much time on homework as I ought to. If I procrastinate, a client's work might pop up in the morning before an assignment is due. So I've had to be much more structured in my classwork and often try to get a good chunk of it done on Saturday afternoons.
I bet the big difference in experiences relates to what type of school. In state tuition at many state schools can be 1/5 of top-tier private school tuition. Using part time and summer jobs to pay for school that costs $12k/year while living at home is much easier than paying for a school that costs $50k/year plus housing.
Yep. To add on to my earlier answer, if I had gone to any of my public in-state universities, the lottery would have paid for all of my tuition and even some of my books. Georgia is a great place to live if you are a graduating high school senior. Lots of my friends have kept the HOPE scholarship their entire college careers.
Depending on what school you attend, it may be worth taking on lots of debt. Certainly Harvard is worth the extra money.
I went to school in Idaho and paid in-state tuition at a state school so my education was not excessively expensive. I worked part time during the school year and full time in the summers. I still graduated with 25k in student loan debt. I don't think what you are suggesting is possible for everyone.
I spent my first couple years trying to go the no-debt route but quickly realized it would take me 8+ years to graduate.
I lived with my parents for a couple years and then spent some time in the dorms before getting an apartment for a few hundred dollars a month. Living closer to campus was worth every penny but it also meant I couldn't finish school without debt.
I graduated university in May 2011. Paid off all my debt literally a year ago (I just got my bonus for the year -- I used last year's bonus to knock my remaining debt down to a single monthly payment, and then paid it :) ).
There are several reasons I see why it isn't so easy for everyone. One of the easier problems to solve, I think, is that people have become convinced that they need to go to college, that if they don't, they're bound to be losers for the rest of their lives. But first of all, that's not true; and secondly, not everyone really wants to go to college, or is really "cut out" for it, anyway. Mike Rowe has been very outspoken about trade school/vocational school/technical school/etc. as an alternative to enrolling in university, and I agree immensely. He likes to point out that there's a huge demand for welders at the moment, to the point that you can make some pretty big bucks, not to mention that every time I take my car to the mechanic, I second-guess my career choices when I receive the bill ;) The point is, there are parts of the country that are in need of skilled workers, but the people who would otherwise have been eligible hires coming out of a trade school are instead coming out of college with degrees in communications or English, or civil engineering[1].
Another thing is that universities, even public ones, have come to operate like your every day corporate business. "Pay us the right amount of money, and you can be an imbecile and still graduate with a degree". Not only does the graduating class then become diluted with degree holders who are otherwise actually unqualified to be holding said degrees, but the actual quality of the education being given is, in my opinion, sub-par. Why? Because it doesn't actually matter what you learn or how well you grok the material, it only matters that your tuition is paid and you show up to class with your clicker.
The last thing I'll touch on (though there's more yet to talk about, really) is the perception that the more expensive your school is, the more prestigious it is, and therefore the better it is. With a few exceptions, this is rarely the case. You can wind up with a degree from South Dakota Northern Blackfoot Central State University and still be a compelling applicant on the job hunt. Another strategy is to take advantage of the notion that familiarity with an institution is a more powerful driver than actual prestige: attend a public university that has a well-known sports team, and get yourself some in-state tuition in the process (and yeah, the in-state tuition is key here, since otherwise schools with well-known sports programs usually have them because they throw lots of money at their sports programs, and you can wind up paying as much to attend UNC as you would to attend Harvard[2]).
All of these things can combine to produce fresh graduates with degrees in Postmodern Studies from Ivy League universities and debt up to their eyeballs because their parents insisted it was important that they go to university after high school.
University education is an investment, not a requirement. More people need to think of it that way and approach the decision thoughtfully and strategically, or else we'll keep winding up with young adults who take on mountains of debt and piss away four or five years of their lives only to remain broke and unemployable after graduation.
[1]: Not meaning to be mean or anything, but I'm sampling from among my own acquaintances some people who earned these degrees but only enrolled in the first place because they felt pressured to do so, and have since struggled to find employment.
[2]: I pulled that comparison out of my ass and have no idea if it's true. The point is that even public institutions can be ridiculously expensive --- if you're paying out-of-state tuition.
I've worked interesting jobs part-time during the school year and full time during breaks and will graduate without a dime of debt. I've met many students with a similar financial background.