Typewriters were pretty cheap but not very many people owned one. Colleges had typewriter labs sometimes, but it was more common to hand-write your papers and then have a professional typist type them up. I went to college in the '80s and we had labs with a bunch of word processors we could use, but I had borrowed my dad's portable electric typewriter and I mostly used that. During my junior year the G type slug broke off of its typebar, so for the rest of my college career I had to hand-write the Gs on all my papers.

I got my degree in 2008. All my exams were handwritten (but fortunately I didn't have to write 10 pages per question, which is good as I physically can't write that much in the time allotted). I did at least get to type my undergraduate thesis.

For middle school and high school I was in a very rural part of the southeastern USA in the late 70's and early 80's. While the high school had a typing class, it didn't have available typewriters for general use (there may have been one in the library that could be used during school hours but I am not 100% certain). As such, all book reports/research papers/etc were hand written.

Since this was (and still is) a fairly poor part of the USA, folks were not splashing out a bunch of cash on a typewriter for the kid to use for school work. There may have been reasonably priced typewriters from Brother or similar, they were still not cheap by any stretch.

When I got to university there were typewriters available most of the day in different buildings and some computers with networked printers in the computer labs (this was 1985 to 1990). Since this was one of the premier engineering schools in the nation, it had computer labs that were available to all students before other universities made them available beyond the EE/ICS departments.

I had to do some tests in those little blue essay booklets. My hand would be absolutely killing me from cranking out pages of handwriting as fast as possible.