Tech was ridiculously cheap as an in-state student in the late 80s. Pretty much everyone graduated with no debt even then.
MIT was $16,000 a year when I looked at it at the time, I believe. I'm having a hard time remembering the details of their financial aid, but they had some need-based assistance on a sliding scale. You'd end up owing several $10s of thousands, which everyone said you'd "easily" pay off once you got a job out of there, which is likely mostly true. Still, it was an intimidating amount to a lower-middle class kid. It's telling I didn't go there and still have the cost fixed in my head.
My high school counselors/teachers were sort of limited in their knowledge of the upper end of the scale. MIT was all I ever heard about in terms of out-of-state tech schools. All the rich kids went Ivy League, and all the other smart kids went to GT. The Naval Academy had a special aura for a few. A couple people in my class went to Harvard, but no one ever talked about it in terms of a technical education.
No one from my high school went to a school in California. I was aware of Caltech, not that I could have found Pasadena on a map. I knew the name Stanford, but only because of its physics department, and literally did not know what state it was in.
I've made sure my teenage niece is at least aware of what the top schools are.
Cheap, no holds barred, technical education is an invaluable resource! Without splitting hairs, an engineering degree has the lowest unemployment[1], and GT has the highest ROI[2].
