[jboggan]

They certainly didn't when I was accepted in the fall of 1999. I had enough money in my college fund to pay for 1.5 years of tuition, room, and board at Princeton so getting paid to go to a good state school seemed like a no-brainer. I would mostly attribute it to a middle class mindset of education being a necessary cost to be minimized, rather than a very large investment in your future with outsized returns.

[phonon]

In 1998, they substituted grants for loans for students from families earning less than $46,500.

In 2001 they replaced all loans with grants :-(

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jepsen/nytimesJan2801.pdf