Examples and parents are definitely crucial. My parents didn't conceive of applying anywhere but state schools <4 hours away, so that's all I visited and applied to (aside from a single private college I ended up attending because nowhere else offered a decent CS program). I wish I'd had a role model in the software world who I could ask for advice, but I didn't even know a single software dev growing up.
In my anecdotal experience, a lot of families in my hometown area were living well beyond their means anyway, with lots of kids on a single blue-collar salary, a car for each adult and each >16 y/o kid, and vacations to Disney or cruises once or twice a year... so I don't have a sense of a culture of avoiding loans and debt. Even the farmers have been forced into the consumer debt cycle to stay solvent, buying new equipment and expensive animals to keep their tax burdens low but never saving anything for poor economic conditions. I think most kids I grew up with just didn't even see college as an option, since they didn't enjoy learning in the first place.
It's odd to think that most of these kids didn't even bother with vocational schools, as a lot of them are currently slaving away at minimum wage retail/food service jobs.
In my anecdotal experience, a lot of families in my hometown area were living well beyond their means anyway, with lots of kids on a single blue-collar salary, a car for each adult and each >16 y/o kid, and vacations to Disney or cruises once or twice a year... so I don't have a sense of a culture of avoiding loans and debt. Even the farmers have been forced into the consumer debt cycle to stay solvent, buying new equipment and expensive animals to keep their tax burdens low but never saving anything for poor economic conditions. I think most kids I grew up with just didn't even see college as an option, since they didn't enjoy learning in the first place.
It's odd to think that most of these kids didn't even bother with vocational schools, as a lot of them are currently slaving away at minimum wage retail/food service jobs.