Here’s what you can do to keep college costs from ballooning out of control to begin with:
1) Attend a public university as opposed to private one.
2) Select a university close to your home and commute to campus.
3) Avoid fraternities and excessive partying.
4) Keep borrowing to an absolute minimum.
5) Work several part time jobs to cover costs and expenses.
It worked for me. And I’m sure it could work for others.
Yup. You could also go to a two-year school to get general education credits out of the way for less money and then transfer.
Your item 1) is suspect.
The rack-rate for private universities is exorbitant, but good students don’t pay rack-rate unless their parents are very well-heeled, and maybe not even then. Top private colleges and universities have very large endowments and can grant scholarships almost on a whim if they want to attract a particular student — I suppose some internal accounting moves some income from the endowment into the student’s account so it is distributed internally as tuition dollars are, though, money being fungible, I’m not even sure they always do that.
Our daughter went to a highly ranked private college on the East Coast, and we paid essentially the same as to send her to a state school here in Kansas. Why? She came out of HS with enough college credits that at a state school she’d have entered as a second semester sophomore with her language, freshman comp and math requirements fulfilled, had a 4.0 GPA, and came from Kansas (a plus for geographic diversity, since fancy private schools like to boast of having students from “all 50 states and N foreign countries” for some N > 10). They gave her fat scholarships and grants that brought the actual cost down to state school rates.
There is a certain degree of idiocy in living on campus to get a feeling of “independence” while doubling the cost of college to achieve it, before living at home for four or five more years AFTER graduation to pay for it.