I dunno man, I took the community college route, $2k/semester on average. If I was a traditional student I would've been eligible for free tuition on the basis of my ACT (27) score — I graduated with a 1.89 GPA. University is only $3k/sem, but I've managed to secure funding despite my mediocre college GPA. Assuming that continues my average tuition cost will likely dissipate to nothing.

While I was at the college I was living on my own, working full time for $15/h - entry level shit - and throughout that period I stayed close to breakeven with zero external funding and that's with a 1yr COVID-hiatus and relatively high food expenses.

University is a different, but nonetheless, similar story. Grants have magically become available to me transitioning from the poor-school to the university. I will say the property rates here are off the chain, similar to what I'd expect in an economically booming metropolitan. But that leads me to my point:

I can't tell you whether or not somebody from Yale or the University of Nebraska is going to get hired based on their school, however I'll go out on a limb and say that if the UN gal was even remotely prudent she'd be able to skate out with pretty minimal debt, if any.

A lot of people are chasing experiences and prestige, and those things cost money. Unfortunately, out-of-state charges are actually obscene. However there are programs that exist to except certain regions from those. Working to expand those and distribute the student population, I believe, would be generally more favorable than other interventions. Maybe I'm wrong, but the only thing that changed from college to university was the textbook publisher but more importantly - people doing the work we're supposedly being trained for in class.

Moving people around with economic incentives that will, I would presume, bolster the number of participants available on smaller campuses would do a lot to improve things all around. I've seen even modest labs put together some pretty impressive research.

And another nit to pick is that colleges very exclusively target fresh-outta-high school kids. And that is in and of itself pretty predatory, but more importantly it's putting half-baked people in a system they are not equipped to deal with, and with long-run non-trivial consequences if they fuck up - and there's quite a few ways to fuck up. And maybe that's orthogonal to my point above, but at least it would be an available option for those willing to scrutinize the risk/reward proposition, and maybe a basis for restricting funding to individuals.

I would expect a more mature population, on average, to be more diligent in every facet of their education, but especially when it comes to fiscal responsibility and the willingness to hold the system accountable - something which I've been made to do in a couple of instances, which I don't expect I would've done as a kid. My intuition tells me "they" don't want actual adults in, though. Kind of a liability seeing how all the shit works when you've been in the real world, unsheltered for a decade, and coming into the domain of a bunch of pretentious airheads that can't organize their head from their ass.

I dunno, that's my two cents.