It costs me about $8K for this semester at my community college living on campus. So I think that would probably end up being $16-17K for the year.

I went to a liberal arts college in the late '80s and tuition there was about $13K a year. Tuition at comparable liberal arts colleges these days is in the neighborhood of $75K, so it's in the neighborhood of a 6X increase (without factoring in inflation). Which is still a fuck ton but not quite as bad as indicated by this post. However: college tuition (especially at colleges like this) is a very fluid property. They offer quite a lot of "financial aid" which is really nothing more than a discounted rate rather than any actual money changing hands, and it's quite typical for a student to end up paying half the quoted rate. A college's tuition can be better regarded as the maximum rate they're going to charge kids from better-off families.

You can get much lower, but those are subsidized in state tuition rates for residents. That's more 6-12k a year with the Pell grant covering community college completely if you're low income. Same as housing, that's completely address dependent, although it has gone up. But the lowest cost housing was more like 20k for a house in 90s. There are still houses for high 100s now.

Tuition exploded in the 90s. You were already on the bad side of it. I graduated from an "expensive" private college in 1982, and it was about $10k. If I'd gone to a state school, it would have been about $3K.