[dwohnitmok]

Oh I don't doubt that top-tier universities can still be a tough call when the alternative is a free ride, especially from 20+ years ago. In retrospect my comment left out the fact that a substantial portion of students admitted to Ivy league schools (or MIT, all part of the Overlap Group that got prosecuted by the Justice Department back in the early 90s for student aid price-fixing) do in fact get full scholarships for other schools, which can make the calculus for these schools less rosy (e.g. 8k per year, while cheaper than a 20k state school, still is a lot more than 0).

It's just usually not the case that you'll graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, at least these days. It's quite rare IIRC among students receiving financial aid to graduate with more than several thousand dollars of debt from an Ivy over four years, and if you go back several decades I'm fairly certain those numbers go up, but I'd be rather shocked if they went up by more than an order of magnitude.

The OP got really screwed by the Singaporean situation, where if you don't fulfill the post-graduation government work posting obligations, the Singaporean government will claw back all the money it gave you for college plus interest.