But does anyone but the scions of the 0.1% actually ever pay that $50k nameplate cost? For example, Brown University in Rhode Island has a nameplate cost of $49k. However, the average net cost paid by students there in 2016 was only $25k. Students with a family income under $75k paid an average of $12k. That nameplate number is just bogus, in most cases.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=brown&s=all&pg=3&id=...

Sounds familiar. I went to a highly ranked private college where tuition went from 35k in 2007, to about 50k only 4 years later, and now it's around 60k I believe. The professors were mostly excellent and well known in their fields, but at the same time many departments were understaffed while the university spent 42 million dollars on an "Institute for Global Citizenship" that ended up being mostly unused, though it is pretty:

https://img.apmcdn.org/c1675e4ec7a7aec84a32edbfe93999b018c70...

That may be true, but the average net price paid by Macalester students has been flat at $28k for the past three years. The increase in the nameplate cost is meaningless.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=macalester&s=all&id=...

I am surprised it's that low, but it's not meaningless if you're one of the ones paying full price. I / my parents paid the full amount of tuition all four years (minus 20,000$ or so for a national merit scholarship), in part because they had actually saved up.

There are private high schools that cost tens of thousands of dollars too. The OP was talking as if this was normal. The average student is going going to a state school and paying somewhere near $10k a year for tuition.

If you can't get a scholarship and it's not a top 10 school $50k per year probably isn't worth paying.

Most of the public schools around me are ~$10k a semester, not a year.

And then with 10-15k for overpriced student housing since most colleges make mandatory for Freshmen and sometimes even Sophomores. Then you might have to pay 1k a year to pay for a parking spot. 2-5k for cafeteria access. Add it all up and you've got 80k-100k(at 4%-9% interest) for four years at a state school. Its not impossible to get out from under but it represents a large delay, especially for degrees with low ROI

>most colleges

That's not even close to true.

Most public schools don't have residency requirements. The ones that do normally have waivers that are easy to get.

I've also never heard of a school with a residency requirement for sophomores.

Random googling turns up 87 colleges that have residency requirements[1]. So you're right that it isn't "most" but it is also not super rare. I'm just saying its a sneaky way for colleges to bump up costs. Most college students won't go through the work to get a waiver and will just go with the flow. Its like the difference between opt-in and opt-out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/freshman-resi...

The article you posted says that "the vast majority" of those 87 schools are private.

I said most public schools.

I don't really care about the cost of private schools just like I don't care about the cost of private boarding high schools.

Where are you? The average cost of tuition + fees for instate students is less than $10k per year.

Even the UC schools in California are close to that.