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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, back to your question--basically, once you roll in all the "rules of thumb," the "can you afford X amount" is basically a series of questions:

Can we put the EFC of $46,000 on the barrelhead without:

-Reducing our own retirement savings
-Going into debt ourselves (whether by using home equity or Parent Plus loans or w/ev--they are all bad ideas) or
-Compromising our quality of life in a way that we can't sustain for 4 years?

And basically, you're the only person who can answer those three sub-questions.[/quote]

Also, public higher education should [i]absolutely[/i] be free (as it effectively was, measured on a tuition-to-income ratio, until the 1980s). If states reinvested to make this possible, private institutions would be forced to bring down their prices, perhaps via use of their endowments, or go out of business--many smaller private colleges would in fact close.

Other than direct investment by the federal government in instruction, the two things that would most make this possible would be

1. reducing the prison population (since most states have replaced their higher ed spending with commensurate or more expenditures on incarceration) or 2. Medicare for All (since it would substantially displace a lot of state government spending on employees, via their health benefits). [/quote]

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