College costs in the US are similar to US healthcare costs in that they’re very dependent on both the school/program, whether it’s private or public, and individual circumstances.
For example, many top private schools have tuition+board costs upwards of $90k/yr, now— yet if you (or your parents) bring in less than $100k-$200k/yr (again, depends on the school), tuition is completely free, with a sliding scale on incomes based above that threshold. Stanford does not even publish their total cost for a degree any more so much as a matrix to provide a ballpark estimate.
State schools often provide massive discounts for their tax-paying residents to attend. In California, that could be the difference between $20k/yr versus $70k+/yr for UCLA or Berkeley. University of Texas just announced tuition will be free for all in-state families earning less than $100k/yr going forward.
Then of course, there’s the need-based and/or merit-based scholarships, which schools may give out to entice someone they particularly want to attend, or through blanket policies to incentivize their student body: e.g. University of Southern California (tuition with board around $90k/yr now) still gives out 50%-tuition scholarships based on an objective SAT score cutoff.
That’s not to say paying full sticker price for college never happens, but there’s many options before taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I believe the average amount of total debt per student is something like $40k, or ~10k/yr.
EDIT: most of these discounts usually only apply to US citizens; international students are often paying full sticker price, and ineligible for government-backed student loans. Some schools use this policy to have international students subsidize their domestic students, to the point that the UC system got in trouble for prioritizing international students over US ones because it was better for the balance sheet.