Great article. Personally, this is a sensitive issue for me. I am the first person in my family (nuclear or extended) to go to university. When I was growing up I didn't even know university was opportunity for me. It was very difficult to learn about the structure of university and understand what program would enable me to excel in a future career that would make me happy, because there was no one within my family to help guide me. Either way, I feel lucky to have grown up in Canada because my hard work allowed me to get into (and afford) one of the best universities in the world. I excelled and right now I am in graduate school with little debt and applying to do a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been able to do this if I had grown up in America. I know there are some universities that are affordable but many of the best universities are so expensive that people in the lower-middle class really have no hope of attending them without accumulating enormous debt.
It depends on what you want to go to college for. If you want to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or something along those lines then good luck getting through without a lot of debt. A cousin of mine from a firmly entrenched middle class family went to medical school and is now in about 175k of debt. I'm in college for engineering and am in about 40k of debt with another 2 years out a five year program. It's a system that really needs to be reworked, or you're looking at a good portion of a generation entering the working world with massive amounts of debt.
The education debt will be the new economic bubble that bursts. With more and more students take out loans they cant pay back to expensive universities (not to mention for-profit colleges) that they might not graduate from. What also is frightening is there seems to be no way to escape the debt (It stays through bankruptcy). College in America seems to trapped in the past where only the wealthy could take the chance on their children getting a degree, finding a job within that field that pays well enough. What sucks is a massive overhaul of the higher educational system, if that is possible at all at this point, would cause chaos and divide those who paid and those who didn't pay.