[SeanAppleby]

$50000 is not a fancy degree, that's just about the floor for an in-state public school without even accounting for cost of living.

>If you're not willing to work your way through college, or get a loan, or get one of these ISAs, then society isn't worse off if your place is taken by someone else.

It absolutely could be. People are not interchangeable pieces. Our society is built on the achievements of improbable people doing improbable things. You need only imagine a world where Einstein was born on a struggling farm without the resources or encouragement to prosper to understand the problem.

At some level it's a statistical game of trying to distribute opportunity to get the relatively few outliers into position for us to reap the rewards of their output. If you narrow the funnel you minimize the probability of great intellectual work getting done to help steer society, which holds all of society back.

And if you don't understand how it could be infeasible to be able to pay your way through $50k on top of living expenses before starting your career, or how it could be unbearably risky to take on $50k+living expenses in debt as a 20y/o, even if you expect to exit that pipeline with good career prospects, you really need to explore outside of your bubble.