Seems what was missing was a sensible discussion along the lines of "why not go to State U which would cost about half that. Or maybe community college which is much less than even that."
This wasn't hard information to come by.
It's hard to believe you didn't know about your home state university. Your athlete friends surely followed the fortunes of their football team. Around here the State U team is constantly in the newspaper and on the nightly local TV news sports roundup. This has been true in every place I've lived in, decades before the internet.