“If you look around for information on where students actually do enroll for the fall, I expect you will see many families in your community making the same afordability choices…”
It depends of course where you live. In my community a tiny minority of students attend CC. The largest cohort attend the Illinois flagship followed by other state flagships with equal or lesser ( with merit aid) costs. I live in a fairly prosperous community but every year there are families who live well above their means suddenly faced with taking on large debt for college. We lived below our means and we’re lucky ennough for that to mean that we could give our kids the gift of saying " finances for college are not an issue. You can go wherever you want" though one of my daughters friends told her that her parents said that " there’s no way who lives in a house like [Mayas daughter] can afford full pay at those schools out of pocket"
Um that’s WHY we lived in a house like ours!