Good news arrived last week from presidents of Michigan’s public universities.

College is “affordable,” they said.

Speaking as a father of a student at the University of Michigan, I agree college is affordable, but only in the same sense that urine is drinkable.

University presidents backed up their point with a study that says students receive an average $4,874 a year in financial aid, enough to effectively cut tuition in half.

“That cannot be right,” people said. By “people,” I mean myself and almost everyone else with kids in college. We’re average families, and we don’t qualify for anything close to $4,874. Many of us get zero.

It seemed likely the study must inflate financial aid by counting student loans, but this is wrong. Loans are not included. It’s all grants and “merit aid” such as academic, athletic and other scholarships.

The discrepancy between financial aid in the presidents’ study and financial aid encountered in real life might be explained by the magic of averaging. Here’s a small illustration.

Eighty-five football players at Michigan have scholarships worth at least $20,000 a year, considering tuition, room and board, books and fees.

That’s $1.7 million for the football team, or an average $63 to all 27,000 undergraduates. The average is accurate, but it does no good for my daughter or 26,914 other students who are poor tacklers.

To be clear, I do not expect the government to send my children to college. That should be our job, if we can do it.

But the government should pay attention, because trouble is brewing.

College costs keep shooting up, partly because state funding of state universities is falling as a percentage of college budgets.

Financial aid is available, but it starts with someone’s calculation of an “expected family contribution.”

Middle-class families often are told they can afford to pay everything or almost everything. Many strongly disagree about what they can afford.

This is one reason many students have staggering loan debts.

Thirty years ago, I graduated college owing about $10,000 on student loans, a little more than half the U.S. median household income. It was a lot of money, but some people spent that much for Chryslers. Today, I know young graduates with four-year degrees who owe more than $100,000.

These trends cannot continue without a crisis.

With apologies to university presidents, I would not call the situation “affordable.”