Don't a lot of elite universities have student aid, where, if you can't afford to study there, you'll be able to do it practically for free?
For anything else, there are student loans. Easy to get, hard to get rid of. They have higher interest rates than mortgages, and people take similarly long periods of time to pay them off.
I know people who still owe tens of thousands on their undergraduate loans, decades after graduation. They work, they make payments, but they may never pay them off.