Ugh, community college isn’t very affordable out here anymore. I say this as a former community college student. It was $30 a credit when I was going; nowadays it’s $111 per credit, adding up to after lab fees, school fees, and books it gets to around $10K a school year. Then you transfer to a state school and you’re dealing with the same issues but compounded with higher costs.
The other issue is that community colleges have so many low-income students that there’s a lot of competition for need-based aid. At my community college if you didn’t apply in early January on the FAFSA (usually the first day) for the following school year, you wouldn’t get any work-study or other need-based, limited aid (like pell grants, state opportunity grants or Perkins loans) because it’s first-come, first-serve. And that’s if you have parents that will agree to fill out FAFSA if you’re under 24 y/o.
For a lot of the “trades” - community colleges can’t offer programs for the trades due to state laws that ban government institutions from competing with businesses so they’ve been replaced with for-profit, often scammy, expensive institutions. You see this with dental hygienist, hairdressing, autobody, etc, in many states.
And often the more competitive programs at community college (for nursing or dental hygienist for example) will be so competitive to get into that students who get a single B won’t be able to get into the program after taking foundational coursework, so they’re just delaying educational time and money doing pre-recs to qualify.
I went to a $50K a year school and graduated with no debt because they have MUCH bigger pockets and had a sizable endowment - and agreed to meet your full financial need after EFC (estimated family contribution, mine being $2,000 a year which I paid for using my AmeriCorps ed award) - I wish more low-income students were given the information that the sticker price means nothing for private schools. I try to spread this word at least to the homeless youth I teach.
ETA: I do think the middle class of my generation had a ton of emphasis put on “dream school” and “school fit” and not enough put on “overall cost of attendance”.