I'm doing fine, and am not really worried about my kid affording college.
But too many of my friends are _not_ doing fine, and I have a strong suspicion college was not a good ROI for them. The combination of :
* "You MUST do this to be a successful adult"
* "Oh btw it costs several years' worth of your future income"
* "But guess what! Here's a big pile of debt that you can never discharge no matter what" (aside from death and some very, very extreme tax circumstances)
* "And because we're responsible adults who care about the next generation we made sure you attended horrible schools through your youth and have no cultural appreciation for mathematics giving you none of the tools you'd need to accurately determine if this is a good decision"
Finally, as covered in Duckworth's book "Grit" brains / education isn't the key.
No one should want their child to be buried in a six-figure debt. But the answer, at least on the median HN reader's salary, is to save and invest 4-5 figures over each of your child's 18 years. That is what universities will expect when deciding what to charge you, and what the government endorsed when creating tax-advantaged accounts for that purpose.
I guess you could say "Not fair!" but the families that do this outperform the ones that don't, by wider and wider margins, and that right there is "rising inequality."
Just a few years out, my parents' investment has paid off handsomely. They don't want it back. They want it paid forward to my own kids. Morality notwithstanding, this particular belief system seems to be a winning a strategy.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/233301/median-household-...