On debt: You should do your absolute best to avoid borrowing than the standard student loans ($5,500 freshman year, $6,500 sophomore year, $7,500 junior year, and $7,500 senior year). If you find that you can’t be educated anywhere without more debt, and you are offered Perkins loans, then accept those. If you aren’t offered Perkins loans, then a small PLUS loan might be OK. If you were an independent student or if your parent applied for a PLUS loan and was rejected, you would be eligible for $4,000 more in standard loans every year. A PLUS loan in that range probably is workable for many students.
As for paying all of this back with a 10 year schedule, you can roughly figure on $100 each month for every $10,000 of debt. That may not look like much now, but just think what happens to your paycheck every month if you run up a total of $40,000 in student debt and the first $400 of your take-home pay is sucked off to pay off student debt every single month for 10 long years! Use the calculator here to get more precise estimates for loan repayment: http://www.finaid.org/calculators/loanpayments.phtml