I generally encourage kids to just go live a normal life for a few years before college. That way they’re going for something specific they really want to do, and they have an experiential sense of what the dollar amounts mean.
I’m pretty resentful that I had tens of thousands of loans offered to me, far beyond anything my credit would warrant, when I was a teenager, who had been propagandized to go to college for the past ten years of my life.
I feel tricked. Perhaps not on purpose, but I feel like I was tricked.