> In Germany you typically don't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for your education like in the US. If you don't have well-off parents you pretty much have to go into debt.

Indeed there exist good public universities in Germany that are rather cheap and most students attend them. But there also exist private universities. At these, usually there is choice: you can either pay your student fees regularly or if you can't or don't want to, there is also the offer that you study "for free" and after you graduate, you pay some agreed percentage of your (future) salary for, say, 10 years after graduating.

I personally believe that markets are rather efficient. So to every prospective student, it should be a strong warning sign when a (private) university does not offer that you study "for free" and can pay off your "virtual tuition" by some share of your future salary for the next 10-15 years after gradutating, since this shows that the university does not believe that it offers a course of studies that will (in average) give a decent salary to its graduates (otherwise, it would make (financial) sense for the university to make such an offer).