OF COURSE they are! A combination of two years at community college for an Associate's Degree, then night school or online courses to complete the BA while holding a job avoids college debt. Military Academies and ROTC programs used at schools one can commute to pay for college. For the truly qualified, they can take their qualifications to a school that's excellent but not top tier and get scholarships instead of loans. Students can develop a job school such as basic accounting or with a one-year tech degree (often offered through high schools) and use the money they can make to pay for school.
If they're not qualified for any of these, college loans are just a huge scam....a transfer of wealth to the academia elite, to spend their whole privileged lives in their ivy-covered bastions of liberal manipulation.
The statistics about how college vs non-college grads do don't tell the whole picutre. The top quarter of HS grads seem to put together excellent lives. The bottom quarter of college grads tend to end up with useless degrees.
Of course this was back in the late 1980s. It would still be a bargain today even accounting for inflation. The options you outline using ROTC (which I used in my undergraduate days), community colleges, commuter colleges and the like are less money still.
Hillsdale College doesn't even use government loans and does a respectable job of turning out worthwhile graduates at a price quite comparable to those of many taxpayer subsidized universities. There is no reason every university in the country couldn't follow the same model or the model which some states use (North Dakota, Utah, Idaho) where the loans are dispensed by the states at rates typically lower than what Fedzilla charges.
Of course, those loans come with strings attached like you have to actually be showing progress toward graduation and be studying in something which is marketable. That's why they typically charge lower rates than Fedzilla; no $100K loans to Occupy Wall Street types majoring in puppetry.