I sympathize with the aversion to debt but have to note that, empirically, you were not willing to do "anything" to reduce that because you could have gotten a sheepskin from a perfectly acceptable state university for about a fifth of the price.

Now there are many reasons to prefer what you did to what you could have done, but I think paying for your choices is your responsibility, not the responsibility of the rest of us. For example, had you gone on public assistance merely because it was possible due to a bug in the law, you would be transferring money to yourself from folks without college degrees who work much, much harder than you or I ever will. There is no justice in that. The hypothetical availability of that as an option also corrupts your incentives to choose cheaper options like that state school I was just talking about. When you replay those distorted incentives across the whole market, this just increases education prices for everyone.

(This is why I think that subsidies for higher education, such as grants and subsidized loans that I favor in principle, need to be carefully kept in check for them to have any meaning. Otherwise you end up with a bidding war between the colleges and subsidizer for who can pull a higher number out of thin air, with the number eventually footed by the taxpayer. Which is exactly where we have been for the last two decades, with tuition galloping in front of inflation every year.)

I note in passing that you, or any student similarly situated, should be more than willing to take on $60k of student debt in return for any undergraduate education that results in a profession because the delta in earnings outcomes exceeds the loan payments (including interest) by a stupidly high margin.

I went to the cheapest school I could go to.