I think honestly the root of it is the general culture aversion towards talking about money with kids. You have a lot of kids who have no idea what anything costs, who have no clue how much money their lifestyle cost. They find out that their parent makes $100,000 a year and to them that means that the parent should reasonably be able to afford any college that costs less than $60K a year (after all, Mom, after paying tuition you’ll have a whole $40K left over to do whatever you want!)
This means that it’s hard to suddenly have these money conversations now because up until this point the money-based decisions were rationalized under the “because I said so,” principle which seems arbitrary and also creates the impression that the only reason the parents don’t spend as much money as the child wants is because they don’t want to (rather than because it would be irresponsible or impractical). I think if we made more of an effort (as a society) to educate kids about cost of living it might make conversations about spending and debt less disorienting for all parties.