My niece had another relative co-sign her loans because her parents were unable to do so. My niece now has a degree that resulted in a good paying job, and she has been consistently paying the loans so that relative hasn’t had to worry yet. The downside is that my niece was not careful at all with minimizing the total amount of the loans; I think money just isn’t real to kids until they have to start repaying it. She could have minimized the loans by going to her in-state university, and she also studied a year abroad and didn’t plan properly for it, so that she ended up having to do a 5th year of college in order to graduate with the right types of credits for her major.