One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $60K/year tuition prices. US universities charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay.
For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow similar patterns resulting in a large percentage of students paying no tuition, the middle ground of students paying some fraction, and a small number of students from wealthy families subsidizing everyone else.
For those who don't attend the prestigious universities with large endowments, average in-state state-run University tuition is under $10K, though again a large percentage of students receive some form of aids or grants to bring that number down even further.
That said, it's entirely possible or someone to go out and sign up for bad investment private university with no aid and rack up $300K of debt by graduation if they're not paying attention to anything, but it's a myth to think that everyone does this.
The average US college student graduates with around $30-40K debt depending on whether they go public or private, which isn't all that hard to pay off when our wages are already significantly higher than other countries. We're especially lucky in tech where our compensation differential relative to other countries more than makes up for the cost of university education.