The problem with those averages is that not everyone will get the discounts. Those discounts come largely from financial aid. Since financial aid ignores retirement accounts, maybe people here who have "everything" in retirement accounts, could get the discount. But the financial aid formulas expect the parent to drop about 6% of your non-retirement assets annually. So if you have two kids, not at college at the same time, after they're done, the formulas have you with about half the assets you started with, not to mention a good chunk of your paycheck. The bottom line for the discounts is "if you have the money, you won't get the discount". And I presume that most people on this board "have the money".
And for all of the discussion about a couple thousand here and there with taxes, that's peanuts compared to the discounts (many thousands per semester) you can get with the "right" FAFSA inputs. One thing is for sure: UGMA is a super dumb idea if you're going to try for financial aid. You save $12 is taxes and then your financial aid discount is cut by $1,200, hehe.
I guess I don't get the criticism that the problem with averages is that no everyone gets them...
Isn't that the nature of an average, there are extreme outliers on each side? Some students get nothing, some students get more than they need. On average, students pay less than the sticker price. The sticker price is all the media ever reports on, so we get tons of college about stories of people with tons of student loan debt, because they choose from the outliers, not the average.
I am with you on this. I have true apples to apples comparison, and college costs swamp the inflation rate in competition personally for me anyways. I paid $30 a credit hour in mid 80s. Now this year it is $290 a credit hour. I got the privilege of paying full rack rate then, and get an encore opportunity with DD this year. This is not including all the newly created "fees" over the years which almost entails everything up to a "breathing campus oxygen air fee".
My anecdote is different. I got 1 $1000 scholarship before going to school, but once you get in, departments and the school have scholarships you can apply for every year. With the internet added on, there's more scholarships then ever to go around. Once I became a grad student and got a TA/RAship, my school decided to fully pay my tuition.
My wife went to a small private college, which had a sticker price that was over twice as much as my public university. However, neither her, nor any of her 3 roommates, paid anything close to that. They all had tons of financial aid/scholarships (and they had very different family financial backgrounds). She paid less for me than college her first year. Then she transferred to the same state university as me and got a nice scholarship for transferring (literally, there's money set aside to provide scholarships for transfer students), and was still paying less than me.
Then you can look at my brothers, who did nothing special in high school from a grades, testing, or extra-curricular standpoint, but because their birth father was hispanic (and they've long since disowned him), they could mark "minority" on their application and get $20k scholarships. They lost them, because they're lacking wisdom, but that's another story.
Long story short, we hear all about how much college costs, but financial aid is more plentiful then ever, especially if you are willing to consider several different colleges, especially different types. Check out 2 small private schools along with the major state schools, and so on.
All the articles about people leaving with $150k in student loans, probably didn't try to find a decent deal at college and also probably spent all 4 years in student housing. Both of those are bad ideas when off-campus housing is less than half the price of university-provided housing.