A Boring Dystopia

My mom qualified for, and received, federal student loan forgiveness. Yes, she had to make payments and work in a qualifying job for 10 years but due to her low income the payment amount was adjusted down.

Unless you're in a position that qualifies for loan forgiveness, and you trust that forgiveness will be there when you qualify, income based payment rates are not a good idea. The total amount owed by my mom actually grew over the years because the amount she was paying was less than the amount of interest charged. For a bit when she was 8 years in she had a scare that she wouldn't qualify and was shocked to find this out, despite saying "I've paid thousands!!!".

Your average American isn't very financially literat, or lives in the land of denial, which makes them easy to take advantage of.

The US has income based repayment plans for all federally guaranteed loans. By removing or changing the limits in the formula, which is likely what Trump did, people that were paying $50/mo might have to pay market rates for their repayment which is unaffordable to pretty much everyone.

With ibr your interest tends to not increase despite having a much longer repayment time, allowing you to, you know, live and pay your student loans instead of having to choose in most cases.

I wish more people understood no one can stop you if there is no one to stop you.

There are no cheaper schools. There are expensive ones and more expensive ones. There is literally no option for the non-rich except to go into debt or learn to be a plumber.

Three things going on:

1. Schools are expensive because the amount of public funding to universities has been slowly shrinking over the past 60 years. College in the US back in th 1960s was very cheap.
2. Student loan amounts due did not change, but income based repayment options did which means people's minimum payments went up
3. Students in the US were told college is the only career path for the past 40-50 years. This obviously isn't true and is why we have trades shortages. In many cases, that's also all the advice people received. There was no coaching for what kind of degree to pursue or what field to angle for, so a number of people got expensive degrees that didn't have good career prospects. To be completely honest, I lucked into choosing engineering because of my interests and the interests of my friends

Children are told that they MUST go to college to get a stable and high paying job. This is so prevalent that college degrees are just seen as “the next step after high school” and nobody questions it. These colleges have figured out they can charge almost anything because they are seen as the gate keepers to high paying and stable jobs. So banking on future earnings, bearly emancipated teenagers, with the absolute minimum of a financial education, make life decisions that will put them in debt for the next 20-30 years.

The problem with the whole system is there doesn’t appear to be enough high paying and stable jobs.

As far as going to a cheaper college, I think you identified the issue in your very own comment. Schools have different prestige levels. Yale, for example, is a high prestige school and not only are you paying for an education, you are also paying to connect to rich people. These connections can be worth a lot of money if they are used correctly. So going to a cheaper college also means less valuable connections.

I went to a really cheap school. My master’s was 40k.

Same as in the UK I imagine. No university is affordable. Unless you are rich, you can't go without a loan.