[mikeyouse]

You have to be pretty reckless to graduate with that much debt - most states have fairly affordable in-state tuition for their citizens. So pick a random state like Nebraska (https://admissions.unl.edu/cost/) and you can see that the premier public state university charges $10,400 per year for tuition and then they estimate housing and food at $14,000 more. So if you don't contribute at all in the mean time, you'll likely graduate with about $100k in debt. More commonly, students work summer jobs or on-campus jobs, receive scholarships to reduce the cost, and then many have parents who help with the cost which is reflected in the average student debt of about $35k for all college graduates (https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#nebrask...).

If you go to a private school, or a public school in a state you don't live in, you can easily double or triple those costs, but there are routes for bright students to study at excellent schools for pretty low cost.

[johnnyanmac]

man, graduating with 100k debt from a low CoL state like Nebraska is absolutely depressing :(. I remember my tuition being $6/year from 15 years ago, and was lucky military benefits covered that. Rent, textbooks and "other expenses" still had me end up with roughly 60k in debt, but that's not bad at all for California, even back then.