My niece is going with 2 years of junior college to get the lower division items wrapped up. She has a "contract" with UC Davis to transfer into a program leading to veterinary school. Her brother is a junior at U.C. Davis right now. That takes the combined efforts of my sister (30 years as an RN) and her husband (a civil engineer) to do a "pay as you go".
My middle son decided to throw in his lot with the USMC. He graduated with a 4.33 GPA, scores of "5" on every AP placement exam and enough credits to be a college sophomore before he graduated from high school. After his tour in Iraq/Kuwait, he return to San Diego. He opted for a BS in Business Administration from University of Phoenix. That was financed by veterans benefits, working as a real estate agent and some student loans. He'll be paying those loans off for a while, but is well set up as a real estate broken in both California and Idaho.
No mention of auto executives salaries here. It's "doable" without that kind of nonsense if you make an effort. My wife is doing a "pay as you go" at Idaho State University. It costs about $2000/semester plus books. She manages about 10 units per semester on top of working full time.
As an aside, my son's high school girl went to Georgetown. She was attending when the plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11. Her parents mortgaged their home to cough up $38,000 per semester. She is now teach math in New York in exchange for a discounted tuition to get her master's at Columbia. That's over $300,000 to educate a math teacher for the public schools. Ouch.
Ouch is right.
While I’m sure she’s a very nice girl, from a pure economics perspective, that makes no sense whatsoever, neither from an individual economics perspective, nor from a societal perspective.
In general, too much of the college system is divorced from real economics, with easy Federally-guaranteed student loans and such. (I realize that wasn’t her situation, just commenting a on related larger issue)