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Comment by tor0viking | Hacker News Reader

Europe is able to keep its colleges and Universities free or mostly free because the European collegiate experience is a much simpler and stripped down version of what you find at US Universities.

In the US, living on campus is the norm, a vast array of amenities and services are offered to students, and University bureaucracies are huge and growing by the year.

Contrast this with Europe, where many Universities are simpler affairs with students living at home, commuting to classes (which have higher student to professor ratios) at Universities without student centers, gyms, etc.

It's not that the US through sheer stupidity is missing out on some easy fix for college costs, the issue is simply that in the US Universities offer more than in Europe. This is in keeping with our overall culture.

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Having studied in both US and Germany, US universities seem to have a much lighter focus on studying itself. The negative view would be that the are a lot more distractions like fraternities, sorts teams etc. Another view would be that there is a strong focus on network building. Fraternities and the whole school loyalty thing are practically made for this. It's a clear advantage to have those connections for the individual. I do wonder what this does to society as a whole. Maybe it makes matching people to jobs easier, maybe it makes it easier to find people to even start a company with. I could easily see how this caused silicon valley to be adding UC Berkeley and Stanford rather than TU Munich or the Sorbonne. Maybe it's mostly a zero sun game that's very expensive?

To be honest I don't like the US model. All the extra fluff isn't helpful in any substantive non-zero-sum way.

You have the freedom to be entirely focused on academics in the US, participating in research etc. But you also have the freedom to live off your loans without any serious focus on academics, treating college like a vacation more than anything else. For the "students" who are tempted by the latter option, college is a waste.

The US model is in force (with variations) in the Netherlands, the UK, Denmark, Northern Ireland, Latvia, Iceland, Hungary, and for that matter, Australia. The conditions vary greatly, and I'm sure I've missed some.

The European commission already tried to swap all systems for a loan based one twice.

Which "European model" are you talking about ? If there is any of the models worthy of being called "European model", surely it'd be the commission's model, which would be the US model (with the state going after students who fail to pay, not sure about bankruptcy cases).

I think the model torviking and I were contrasting with US is not how you pay for education but around facilities and culture at universities. Do the countries you listed have universities with lots of facilities that aren't directly related to learning, strong emphasize on university loyalty with fraternities, sports teams everyone celebrates etc?

Yes in part, but the mechanism is important, and what is being solved more so.

The USA is like the EU, where the various states vary as much if not more than the countries in the EU. The USA is far more racially varied than individual EU countries. The USA has used two big main policy tools to right wrongs of the past: home ownership and education. This has led to terrible policies, like the crazy mortgage crisis and student loan act, that means you can never get out of the debt through bankruptcy, which is morally extremely questionable.

When you have debt that can never liquidate, things get a little crazy, and a lot of the US college craziness is as a result of too much guaranteed money.

I'm not convinced. I've seen both and the difference in amenities does not add up to dozens of $ of tuition per student or more

You need to look at the bureaucracies. They are huge and growing. I've worked in University administration, I've seen the cost breakdowns. Personnel and administrative costs represent the bulk of University spending.

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