Highly recommended

The solution is a patchwork:

1) Recognize that only foreign students, on average, pay full sticker. For example, 50% of Yale students receive financial aid, an average of $41k a year. That still puts the average Yale education at $20k a year... but that kicks the shit out of the MSRP of hold-onto-your-butts $61k a year.

2) Recognize that the utility of community college vastly outstrips the utility of 4-year or private school, and that every major state school system has been spending the past 20 years shoving more 4-year programs onto their community college systems.

3) Recognize that there are right now three different competing accreditation schemas whereby if you pass the test, you get the credits, meaning that distance learning/Khan Academy stuff for general education requirements are going to become the norm, not the exception.

4) Recognize that much of the debt incurred is shady-ass for-profit diploma mills such as Corinthian College, which are being shuttered rapidly.

Chances are good that if we're not at an inflection point, we're near one. The millennials, at best guess, have taken the brunt of the college scam and that things are normalizing slowly. College ten years from now is going to be very different from college ten years ago.

You also need to keep in mind that there's already a not-too-bad debt forgiveness program - 360 payments of any (qualified) size, or 120 payments of any (qualified) size if you're in an "essential profession." Effectively, you can do interest only for thirty years and be off scott free.