Exactly the same experience here -- my mother got a bachelor's right before my brothers and I went to college, which just ended up penalizing us because it looked like we should have a lot more savings than we really had. I think there's a very very small portion of the population who gets their tuition reduced enough to be comfortable. Loans end up covering the rest, so yeah, your average student really does pay close to $20k a semester at most schools if you account for room & board + tuition.
The real issue is that we want "means testing" for tuition but almost no students have significant "means". So you either make (at least public) universities free, or you make the rather strange assumption that a bunch of adults will be handed tens of thousands of dollars from their parents. In pretty much no other case do determine social program eligibility of an adult by means testing different adults.
This is a new thing (not the means testing but the idea behind it) AFAICT.
It was just assumed that if your parents were above the "means" they would help out any way they could because that's what was expected of them as parents.
College was also seen as an enabler and not an expectation for my generation.
Or...if your parents spent all the college fund sending your sister to UCLA you could join the army and emerge as an "adult" so your parents' income wasn't taken into account and get grants and loans on top of the G.I. Bill.
Of course when college was a stretch but not median-income-barely-covers-tuition expensive, the assumption that parents would cover it were more reasonable. And it was less of an issue if they didn’t since the debt load wasn’t insane.
I don't think my parents could've afforded to send my sister to Stanford back then which is roughly the equivalent to your average state school today (completely guessing here). They probably would've found a way though.
My point still stands though, means testing was intended to get the best and brightest into college even if they're poor, couldn't even imagine Reagan/Bush entertaining the idea of giving middle-class kids a free ride -- in fact I can even picture Reagan on the TV saying "Uncle Sam ain't your baby daddy!"
> Or we could do loans with repayment based on post-education income
The US already does this for federal loans, though it's not the default option, and the servicer (Navient) has been accused of actively steering borrowers away from the option, because it hurts the value of the loan-backed securities that Navient sells.
