There is a great deal of variation in the opinions of what parents should do for their kids' college educations and what the best route is. Two areas of great variation are (1) how much the parents should pay, and (2) what the "best" college choice is for the student.
Some parents are willing to and thing it is "best" to pay for the best school a kid can get into, and that it's worth the $75K a year to go to Rice or Oberlin or MIT or Yale. The value of connections, top notch jobs, and the college experience of being taught by Nobel laureates and eating at the dining hall with the children of famous people is worth it to some.
Others think a degree is more of a commodity or checklist item and it's the student themselves who determines the outcome in terms of job and career. These parents can see that a school that is adequate to good can be an order of magnitude cheaper and maybe it's better for the kid to have a college degree from an in-state public and $270K in the bank.
I think there are elements of truth to the above two endpoints and that things vary across the entire spectrum in between. I've observed great variation in my own family in terms of which schools the students have chosen, the out-of-pocket price tags, and the results. Most of us are working with small sample sizes of only a few children, and we want to believe that our chosen strategy was a good one. The kid who ended up paying $300K for their education and got a great job - well, maybe they needed that degree from that school to get that job, maybe not. The kid who got the public school degree for $30K may have had an entirely different life if they had just roomed at Princeton with the kid of a Silicon Valley robotics startup. We can't roll back time and test the counterfactual.
I'm glad people think about it a lot and put a lot of effort into it.