You have to be pretty reckless to graduate with that much debt - most states have fairly affordable in-state tuition for their citizens. So pick a random state like Nebraska (https://admissions.unl.edu/cost/) and you can see that the premier public state university charges $10,400 per year for tuition and then they estimate housing and food at $14,000 more. So if you don't contribute at all in the mean time, you'll likely graduate with about $100k in debt. More commonly, students work summer jobs or on-campus jobs, receive scholarships to reduce the cost, and then many have parents who help with the cost which is reflected in the average student debt of about $35k for all college graduates (https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#nebrask...).

If you go to a private school, or a public school in a state you don't live in, you can easily double or triple those costs, but there are routes for bright students to study at excellent schools for pretty low cost.

man, graduating with 100k debt from a low CoL state like Nebraska is absolutely depressing :(. I remember my tuition being $6/year from 15 years ago, and was lucky military benefits covered that. Rent, textbooks and "other expenses" still had me end up with roughly 60k in debt, but that's not bad at all for California, even back then.

College costs in the US are similar to US healthcare costs in that they’re very dependent on both the school/program, whether it’s private or public, and individual circumstances.

For example, many top private schools have tuition+board costs upwards of $90k/yr, now— yet if you (or your parents) bring in less than $100k-$200k/yr (again, depends on the school), tuition is completely free, with a sliding scale on incomes based above that threshold. Stanford does not even publish their total cost for a degree any more so much as a matrix to provide a ballpark estimate.

State schools often provide massive discounts for their tax-paying residents to attend. In California, that could be the difference between $20k/yr versus $70k+/yr for UCLA or Berkeley. University of Texas just announced tuition will be free for all in-state families earning less than $100k/yr going forward.

Then of course, there’s the need-based and/or merit-based scholarships, which schools may give out to entice someone they particularly want to attend, or through blanket policies to incentivize their student body: e.g. University of Southern California (tuition with board around $90k/yr now) still gives out 50%-tuition scholarships based on an objective SAT score cutoff.

That’s not to say paying full sticker price for college never happens, but there’s many options before taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I believe the average amount of total debt per student is something like $40k, or ~10k/yr.

EDIT: most of these discounts usually only apply to US citizens; international students are often paying full sticker price, and ineligible for government-backed student loans. Some schools use this policy to have international students subsidize their domestic students, to the point that the UC system got in trouble for prioritizing international students over US ones because it was better for the balance sheet.

>I've heard students are left with hundreds of thousands in debt when they graduate.

That's very atypical. The average student loan size at graduation is around $33k to 41k. The only way you get "hundreds of thousands in debt" is if you go to an expensive private university and pay full price.

https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt

>The average private nonprofit university student borrows $33,910 to complete a bachelor’s degree.

>For-profit students borrow an average $40,970.

I think it's only looking at grad+. The chart right below the summary says total average loans are $60k. and that's nationwide. You need loans for more than tuiition, after all.

The answer is “it depends”. Could be zero dollars, could be $250K. Most people probably pay around $50K to get one, assuming it’s a public university and you pay the in-state tuition rate.

> Also, can you pay student loans with pre tax income?

You're asking if student loan debt repayment is tax deductible, and the answer is no.