Just spent way too much time digging through college costs and honestly, the variation state to state is wild. Like, I was looking at the cheapest college in Michigan and found Lake Superior State at around 25k total for the year, but then you look at somewhere like Utah where Snow College comes in under 10k and it's just shocking how different things are across the country.

The whole college pricing thing has been all over the place. Tuition kept climbing for years—like 28% increase from 2008 to 2019 at public schools—but then COVID actually made things dip a bit. Between 2019 and 2022 prices actually fell slightly at private schools. Weird timing, right? But honestly even with those drops, we're still looking at an average of like 26k a year in-state at four-year institutions.

What caught my attention is how much you can save by just picking the right school. Some states have genuinely cheap options. West Liberty in West Virginia is under 9k total, Southern Texas College around 11k, and then there's the expensive outliers like Vermont at 32k. If you're comparing the cheapest college in Michigan versus somewhere like Florida or Nevada, you're looking at pretty significant differences in what families would actually pay.

The whole analysis looked at tuition, fees, room and board across every state. Honestly if I were picking a school right now, I'd definitely be checking what the actual cheapest college in Michigan and neighboring states would cost before committing to anything. The savings over four years could be massive.