> That doesn't completely answer the question. It addresses discounts and grants, but there's more to it than that.

Discounts are huge. "Discounts" is just another way of saying that the university charges different prices based on how rich you are, and the sticker price is basically a fiction. It's essentially total price discrimination, except we only learn the true prices after we reveal our income level. It's certainly a problem worth solving.

> Yes, it does, and that's still no accounting for differences in size. Even state schools vary widely. Eastern Michigan University is not University of Michigan by a long shot.

You'd be surprised, the difference isn't as wide as you think it is. The Wall Street Journal put together a tool to let you compare the median debt + earnings per college and degree -> https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-college-graduates-make-th...

Eastern Michigan University + Engineering

Median debt: $12,643

Median earnings: $48,900

University of Michigan + Mechanical Engineering

Median debt: $17,525

Median earnings: $74,200

In both instances, earnings exceed debt. Also keep in mind, those numbers are total debt, not tuition. You can play around with the tool and select different universities and different majors. It's behind a paywall, but if you don't have access, I can pull the numbers for whichever university you'd like to compare.

> That matters little to someone trying to figure out how they're going to afford a house while they're still paying off student loans.

No, the implication is that the salary for college graduates is almost always above the median wage. The calculus is whether the wage increase is higher or lower than the monthly cost to pay off the degree. If it's lower, then the degree is not worth it.

> Also, if college is no less affordable, why are they so buried? Graduating with more student-loan debt than income was practically unthinkable when I went to school. It's commonplace now. Why?

Because it's one thing to say that student loan debt is commonplace, and another thing entirely to suggest that unpayable student-loan debt is commonplace. Consider that almost 100% of homeowners have mortgages (and hence are in debt), but most of them pay them off, and end up with an asset at the end of it. College degrees are (for the most part) exactly like that. The median student loan debt is $17,000 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/02/03/student...) — but paying that off is like paying off a car loan for a Toyota Corolla, only college degrees aren't a depreciating asset (depending on the major).

> This whole empathy-lacking "it's no harder than it used to be" argument just doesn't pass the smell test.

I wouldn't ascribe intent, but data like this is important to understand what the reality is for the majority of people. While there absolutely exists adverse situations where someone is riddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt with no employable skill to help pay that off, it doesn't represent the majority of college graduates. The news also has a bias for reporting on the most exceptional cases, you never really hear about the successes. Importantly, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't help those that are struggling. It just means that we don't need to upend the entire system to do so.