The Standard of Living at College Is Very Different from My College Days.
That is playing a role in student debt, I'm sure, along with inflation and enormous rises in tuition rates.
I remember sharing an old run-down house with 11 other people in my second pass through college. It didn't cost each of us very much at all. It wasn't a nice place, really, and the furniture in it mostly came from curbs nearby, but it sufficed. We didn't eat well, either, at all. I biked to campus, which was about 3 miles away, and didn't even think of owning a car.
That saved a lot of money. Books? I either bought used books or used the texts at the library. I assume there are still used books.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Ewwww.
Spoiled brats! 
In our worldview, no generation had it harder than we did. But reality is always something else. I am practicing saying "Get off of my lawn!!!!", but fortunately I have a few years left before I use it.
It was insane what people were just throwing away at the end of each semester!
Our best finds were a perfectly good kegerator and a 55 gal. aquarium with the hood and decent filter system. The town also had a designated Big Trash Night once a month, when you could put anything out on the curb for pick up. BTN was an Event for us.
so many of my experiences were quite similar.
The truth is that at state colleges and universities the tuition was low enough back then (I started college in the fall of 1965) a summer job at minimum wage, if you lived at home and saved most of your earnings, might possibly cover tuition and fees.
I was in Tucson and attended the University of Arizona, which was a very low cost college at the time. I'm sure it still is, relatively speaking. I met students who were from New York and New Jersey who were there because the out of state costs, including dorm and meal ticket, was still less than what they'd pay back home.
I had two scholarships. if I were to tell you the dollar amounts you'd have trouble believing me, but one covered tuition and fees, the other my books. Books weren't terribly expensive back then. Also, I lived at home, so I didn't have dorm costs.
Here's another interesting factoid. The fall of 1965 was when the first huge wave of baby boomers hit the colleges. Not only were we a numerically large group, but all of a sudden (thank you Vietnam War) a lot of kids were going to college who wouldn't have been going even a year or two before. As a consequence, many public universities had a sudden and enormous crunch from all those students. At the University of Arizona one change was that before 1965, even if you lived in the city of Tucson, you were required to live on campus at least for your freshman year, unless you had some really good excuse not to. But in the fall of 1965, when I started, if you lived in Tucson you were not permitted to live on campus, unless you had some really good excuse to do so. Even so, they were packing four students into dorm rooms intended for two.
Some decades later when I took my sons on college visits, I was often amazed at the many changes the years had wrought. The one that stands out the most is Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. Granted, it's a private university, but still. There was a tour for the parents, and when we got to the dorms I tell you every parent was ready to abandon their children on the spot and enroll ourselves. The dorms were like palaces, especially compared to what had existed 35 or so years earlier.
The textbooks situation, as has already been discussed, is horrifying. My Son the Astronomer has told me that at the graduate level in his field it's not too bad, because often there is no text or there are inexpensive ways to download what's needed.
Here's another thing that a lot of people don't know. If you -- or your kid -- are/is in the hard sciences, you should not have to pay a penny more for school (other than said textbooks) after the undergraduate degree. One of My Son the Astronomer's high school teachers had told me that, and I discovered it's true. When he enrolled in a master's degree program out of state, the first letter he got from the school (after acceptance and his commitment to attend) was to inform him that he would be charged in state, not out of state tuition, saving a bunch of money. A few weeks later a second letter came waiving tuition entirely. Then a third letter outlining his TA responsibilities and what he'd be paid. It was darn near enough to live on.
He's since relocated to another school on the east coast, now in a PhD program (he won't be getting a master's, but in his field that's not a drawback). A similar series of letters ensued. The only trivial difference is that he's in a part of the country that is more expensive, so his day to day expenses (apartment rent and the like) are higher, but there are savings to cover that.
I am hugely in favor of forgiving loans, of making undergraduate degrees free or close to that. Medical school should not cost a huge amount. I'm still not sure about law school. Let me think about that one.
Schools are building luxury dorms for the well-heeled, and at the other extreme there are homeless students living in cars. College costs aren't skyrocketing because college kids are living it up. According to an article titled "New study finds that 36% of college students don’t have enough to eat"
<snip>
Housing is also a major challenge for college students. Researchers found that 36 percent of all college students and 46 percent of community college students were considered to be housing insecure. Nine percent of four-year college students and 12 percent of community college students reported experiencing completely homeless in the past year. Among community college students, 22 percent reported being both food and housing insecure.
The graphic below looks only at tuition costs at a public university - this sets aside housing and food. I think this demonstrates that it's not lifestyle choices squeezing college students.
The Myth of Working Your Way Through College
...in order to make ends meet.
Who would have sold my socks in college to make ends meet if they did not have so many holes in them.
