One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $60K/year tuition prices. US universities charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay.
For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow similar patterns resulting in a large percentage of students paying no tuition, the middle ground of students paying some fraction, and a small number of students from wealthy families subsidizing everyone else.
For those who don't attend the prestigious universities with large endowments, average in-state state-run University tuition is under $10K, though again a large percentage of students receive some form of aids or grants to bring that number down even further.
That said, it's entirely possible or someone to go out and sign up for bad investment private university with no aid and rack up $300K of debt by graduation if they're not paying attention to anything, but it's a myth to think that everyone does this.
The average US college student graduates with around $30-40K debt depending on whether they go public or private, which isn't all that hard to pay off when our wages are already significantly higher than other countries. We're especially lucky in tech where our compensation differential relative to other countries more than makes up for the cost of university education.
As someone from a country (Sweden) that to a larger extent has decreased people’s reliance on their families, and grown the welfare state instead, it’s weird to think that your parents wealth or income should have any impact on things like tuition, once you’ve reached the age of majority
Once I finished high school, my parents had nothing to do with my business as far as any institutions were concerned, and vice versa. But uni was tax-funded and free at the point of use. And when they get too old to care for themselves, it will likely be the government supporting them financially, not me (unless I strike it rich first, in which case I suppose they’ll spend their sunset years in style)
I'm not saying the European system is bad. Certainly there's a lot to complain about with a system that asks 18 year olds to make life-defining decisions about both their career and their financial prospects. But the differences do go beyond whether or not you're on the hook for your tuition.
Also talking about Germany, unless things changed dramatically in the last few years, most natural sciences and engineering degrees don't require a grade point average.
It seems like these are unrelated issues.
Does the wider freedom of choice in US education somehow cause college to cost more? Because more people want to go?? I don’t get it.
> Europeans solve these problems just by caring more about human values
Personally I think the government should get out of the business of these loans, fully fund state schools to make them all free, and let the private schools and the private banking market deal with the rest of it. We were going down that path in CA until Reagan killed it when he was governor. [1]
[1] https://newuniversity.org/2023/02/13/ronald-reagans-legacy-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Service_Loan_Forgivenes...
IIUC, there was a bit of a scandal where the companies the DoE where paying to manage those 10 year forgiveness plans where giving incorrect advice and so a lot of people aren't going to qualify.
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bece...
Of course we can blame them for taking $60k out for studying something that will never get them a good paying job, but these are 18 year olds. I was lucky in that my parents are immigrants and were like "absolutely not, this is crazy, go to the flagship state school and study science". I paid off my $24k in loans in a couple years. Many didn't take that path.
[1] Bloomberg archive link: https://archive.ph/IBuzw
This is an extremely important point that keeps getting ignored. People keep comparing _public_ schools in Europe to _private_ schools in America.
To further your point, just about every place has a community college where you can do the first two years of your education for about half the price of the state school. The total tuition for this route (2 years at community college, 2 years at a state school) is going to average just under $30,000 for 4 years. Which is definitely in the "work your way through college" range.
And this is before any financial assistance, which the majority of students receive.
Foreigners talking about how crazy expensive college is in the U.S., but they're likely mislead by people who took out large loans to go to extremely expensive private colleges. There's an easy way to stop this kind of debt - don't allow federal loans for private institutions. But no one is really interested in stopping it.
Not necessarily the case. In Sweden private schools are paid for by the government, assuming they have been approved by the CSN (central agency for study-support(rough translation))
I don't know how that works in the rest of Europe, because I've never studied outside of Sweden. But in Sweden it doesn't really matter if the school is private or public. The only instance you have to pay yourself is if the school isn't sufficiently good to pass muster.
Also, again in Sweden at least, but possibly other parts of Europe as well, the tuition isn't effectively $0. The government will pay any student enrolled in higher education a monthly support. Back in my day it was 10k SEK per month (roughly 1000usd), no strings attached. Not sure how it currently stands but I imagine it hasn't changed much.
This money is meant to ease the burden on students, so that they can put more focus on studies.
"Working your way through collage" over here means you'll have a 20% job to pay for your cost of living minus the 10k SEK mentioned above.
The difference in cost of study is quite real, even taking your comment into account
(I don’t mean to belittle your comment about universities which is factual and helpful. I’m just pointing out that US education system is just as fucked up as the US healthcare system the OP is talking about.)
Even people in the US don't understand why those $200K hospital bills aren't real.
Insurance providers (including government programs) have a fixed limit for what they pay for procedures. They pay min(billed_amount, allowed_amount) so providers don't want to risk leaving money on the table by having billed_amount < allowed_amount. To ensure this doesn't happen, they bill an arbitrarily high number with the expectation that insurance will lower it down to some much smaller number.
So every time you see posts on the internet where people talk about their "$200K hospital bill" they're always talking about that arbitrarily high value. If you have to pay cash for some reason, they will reduce the value to the cash pay amount which is in line with the insurance paid numbers.
Nobody ever pays those high hospital bill amounts.
Why do 41% of Americans have some form of medical debt?
https://www.kff.org/health-costs/kff-health-care-debt-survey...
In the medical context, the only contract in the picture is possibly between the medical provider and the healthcare management organization. It would be fine if providers only sent the fake bills to them as they're both willingly playing this perverse game.
But the problem is when they send their fake numbers to patients as if they're some kind of legitimate bill. Medical bills to patients are presented on a "cost reimbursement" basis - helping you cost them this much, so you are responsible for reimbursing them. By inflating the numbers 3-5x they are straight up lying about the costs they incurred. That's fraud.
This is such a weird excuse for bad policy. Making more money[0][1] somehow means its okay to saddle students with an average debt of $30-40 thousand dollars. A downpayment on a first home would be a much better use of that money, for example.
Really, the average US citizen is nickel and dimed to death with this sort of thing, from health insurance, to dental, to lots of other required but not accounted for as required costs (like cars and associated car insurance).
Not to mention, we have little safety net in the US, you're really going to hurt if you have a bad run of luck after job loss. No qualms in allowing people to become homeless as a matter of policy.
If someone were to ask me, I would say that we in the US have it completely backwards in respect to how the average citizenry is expected to live. Its not thriving, its constantly having some kind of lingering potential disaster to plan for.
[0]: which I sincerely wonder about the true veracity of this statistic
[1]: Don't forget too, that more and more struggle to pay their student loans each year and the trend has generally been that its getting worse, not better.
The implicit policy that student loans are an acceptable and benign form of debt for the average citizen. Everything said after is predicated on this idea.
I don't think thats good policy.
Granted, none of the top universities in my country even makes it to the top 500 in the world, so maybe this isn't a completely fair comparison? Actually, it's expensive by some other EU country standards - public schools in France and Germany, including PSL (ranked 28th in the world) and TUM (ranked 22nd), are free for all EEA applicants, with some nominal yearly registration fees (amounting to $1k in total for a 4-year degree). A more expensive school, like ETH Zurich (rank 7 in the world), is $4500 total for a 4-year degree if you're a Swiss citizen or EEA citizen with a Swiss work permit; it's triple that for an international student.
So yeah, when we say "university is crazy expensive in the USA (and probably UK too)", we're actually talking about the $30-40k numbers you're looking at. $200k and so are almost inconceivable to us.
That's the cost over 4 years. Most people will be able to get financial assistance to help pay for that and you easily manage to make 30k (or less with grants) in 4 years to pay for school. People making below 35k per year are going to pay practically zero taxes. You can work about 15 hours a week making $10 per or full time over the summer to pay for that.
There's no need to take on any debt.
People in the US make considerably more money than those in the EU and, generally pay less taxes so there's a lot more disposable income available. I think people here prefer to be able to just get what they can pay for rather than hope the government will let them pursue the education they want (there are aptitude tests and quotas in some EU countries).
It's not really better ir worse, it's just different.
Sure, if you're a brilliant young mind and can get into Harvard and qualify for assistance with your tuition, you're set for life, basically, in a way no EU university can match. But for the vast majority of the population, the outcomes are significantly better with the EU system.
Also note that the gigantic tuitions at US universities are actually a relatively recent phenomenon (and a similar thing happened in the UK). Even in the 50s and 60s, tuitions were much closer to the current EU norm.
This is not true at all.()
You quote tuition at the school with the highest endowment in the country. The college cost situation is absolutely still high at the less endowed second tier, and “ordinary” (non-generational wealth, two full time earner) families are paying full price.
() Except in the sense that “almost nobody” goes to any of these schools, comparing to the 50k enrollment at large public institutions.
I went to a 2nd tier in-state school 20 years ago and even that cost 10k a year by the time housing, food, and books, were paid for.
Plenty of people who can barely avoid it end up paying a large chunk of $.
