How well prepared are you in terms of other things? For example…before our kids went off to college, we made sure we had cars that were fully paid for, our mortgage payment was low (and we actually paid it off). We had no other consumer debt…no credit card debt, no loans of any kind with payments. We planned ahead.
And we had to keep it this way while both kids went to college…seven years. And in our case, both parents were working full time professional jobs.
We did not take any loans out for college costs that required our co-sign. Our kids knew that was off the table.
But this all happened before our kids applied to college…so we would know what costs we could support (we were able to fully fund expensive private colleges…and we had NO college savings).