Just FYI after I retired from the Army and got my two masters degrees I worked as an adjunct instructor for a good while and some of my program and department related ancillary duties revolved around this very topic and talking to students about what issues they were facing and why. Was a state school too and costs always came up as the top topic for why people dropped out.
not entirely sure what the point of the post is as you don't actually address any of the things I've mentioned in mine... just a random wall of text with 0 regard to conceptual context to the original post.
people who go to out-of-state private universities are the only ones going into low-paying jobs with high debt.
that's a gross over generalization and there is no way you can prove or source backing to that claim. but if you can.. support your assertion with a citation please. also you have a high vs low quality institution spectrum to this too...
Average community college tuition per year in the US is 7460.
Varies greatly and is wholly dependent on what you actually can and need to get for your specific program... one program in one state you can graduate with 40 credits, and other may be 80 depending on requirements. Quoting averages it as best misleading in this context and the highs and lows of the spectrum.
for a 4 year public institution is 25,290.
Again with the averages.. also you ignore housing... its a cost too which many students do pay with their student loans.
you see that it takes down the 4-year cost to only 41,400 total dollars in debt
Hardly a "its only" figure... $40K is substantial for people at that stage in their lives. It ain't cheap with little to nothing
But ultimately, the price of a 4 year in-state high education institution even without working and receiving no merit-based aid is very affordable,
honestly it really is not to many... and you know it. it is affordable to many others as well but you have nothing to base the gross generalization on that it super affordable to everyone involved, not can you ignore the fact that there are programs and institutions be they public, or private that offer them that make 0 sense with regard to the current cost, benefits and associated financing regimes.
Statistics which details in the 2009-2010 school year,
Nice cherry picked year interval... figure I know why ya picked that one specifically too. why even try? Its not like it was relatively stagnant from 2006 till then and gone up by what 20-30% in between that and 2019. Also, mind you we are in 2021 you could easily find some better figures and do historic contrasting to it all. Most recent I could find which covers stuff till 2019... https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
and the American high education system is amongst the best in the world.
No one has ever claimed otherwise. Which being said, much of your ranking related thing is just filler and maybe even a form of gish gallop that has no bearing to the primary topic at hand. Our K-12 non-system for childhood education sucks though due tot he hodge podge nature of it all where for every well run good school you likely have two moldy trailers and everything else in between with education taking a back seat to what is effectively daycare. The failures of many students i personally dealt with and their seeming inability to make the most out of their university education seemed to directly relate to failures in education in K-12. simple things like mathematical illiteracy, lack algebraic thinking skills, failures in critical thinking skills, poor reading and writing skills etc handicap a lot of students in college and on their way out.
K-12 sucks but universities and colleges historically have been world class and then some.
TL:DR, it is very easy on even the lowest-paying degrees to pay back the cost of an in-state 4-year education if you receive at or above average financial aid, and the US is in the top 5 global rankings for international education.
Except that's not the topic at hand outright, its about not being able to expect reasonable returns on time, money and effort spent on an education as one could have before. Right now we have two generations of people large swaths of which have been effectively screwed out of what has been historically expected progression with regard to ability to pay off loans, and career advancements etc. First during the downturn directly related to republican economic policies of the Bush era, and now a 2nd time due to Trumps incompetence. these types of economic disruptions have a direct and long lasting impact on peoples ability to make ends meet and it takes time to recover from them.