California college students' average debt among lowest in nation
Despite protests about rising tuition at California's public colleges, students in the state graduate with one of the lowest average loads of education debt in the nation, according to a new study.
The Cal Grant financial aid program and the relatively low tuition at the California State University system helped rank California as third from the bottom in the country for the amount of debt owed by 2011 graduates from schools here, said the report by the Oakland-based Institute for College Access and Success.
Just 51% of graduates from California's public and private nonprofit colleges took on student debt, compared with 66% nationwide, and those loan totals averaged $18,879, which was about $7,700 below the national average.
Only students in Utah, $17,227, and Hawaii, $17,447, had smaller loan totals, the survey found. The high debt states were clustered in the Northeast and Midwest, with New Hampshire, $32,440, and Pennsylvania, $29,959, at the top.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1018-student-debt-20121018,0,2115478.story
= new reply since forum marked as read
because BYU is esentially free if you are a member of the LDS church.
Similarly, Hawai'i students tend to stay in-state, mostly in the University of Hawai'i system (there are only a handful of small private colleges there).
And us? Why, that must be because we have UC and CSU! For now, anyway. 
(Hint: Yes on 30).
Combined with the hammering that the middle class has taken...
I'm from a solid middle-to-upper middle class family. But our homes lost value (housing bubble) and our investments in the stock market took a beating...
We've gone from thinking we could afford to subsidize the education of four children to just barely hanging on.
