Here's a very, very simple chart that shows population with tertiary education [1]. The US is not significantly above other countries where education is paid for by the government.
What's more is that those numbers are very generous to the US because, as everybody knows, most private colleges in the US are shit. So called "non-selective schools" as well as the straight up for-profits and the religious schools will take anybody that applies and hand them a degree in 2-4 years.
Like much of the nonsense about free markets etc in this thread there's little understanding of actual facts. The American education situation exactly parallels healthcare: other OECD countries are able to provide better service for less cost by having the government direct the resources. But, yes, somehow we need to get the government out of education. That will surely fix everything.
(Though serious people know full well what will happen if the government stops funding higher education. Graduation rates will plummet and within a generation advanced education will abandon middle America. The rich, highly educated coasts will do just fine. The real question is, as always, whether the ideologues are committed enough to cut their children throats in the name of their god, the free market. Then again we already see rapidly decreasing graduation rates in America [2] and the increasing prevalence for worthless degrees from shitty schools so I guess we already know the answer that one.)
[1] https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-educat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decreasing_graduation_completi...