Congrats on getting through at such a low cost--it's really hard to attend nowadays without taking on so much debt. You have to know, though, that you (and I) are in a small minority of students today.

And that's the article's point: college is so damn expensive now, almost everyone has to take on debt to pay tuition. The undergrad experience is badass, but it's also fraught with problems:

-- Students are asked to choose a major (and thus, by implication, a career) before they turn 21. If they choose incorrectly and need a different degree, the costs are astronomical.

-- Non-engineering classes are completely bunk until about the third year. Before then it's mainly "weed-out" courses which teach students little or overload them with work.

-- The cheapest (public) schools also have the largest classrooms. You pay less in tuition, but quality of education suffers.

We ask students to decide on a career during a transitional phase in their lives, in an economy where no one works in the same field for more than a decade, and then charge them $50k in the process? That's just unfair.