If you want to make university education affordable, it might be a good idea to look at places where university education already is affordable, and see what they are doing differently.

   I. Staffing

Let's take a look at Heidelberg University.

2,608 Academic staff

1775 non-academic staff

28,500 students

annual spending of $100,000 per staff or $14,000 per student.

(All numbers are excluding medical school/medical students).

Now let's look at a US university: Penn State.

5946 FTE academic staff

24422 FTE non-academic staff

76,219 FTE students

spending $32,406 per student or about $100,000 per staff.

So both Penn State and Heidelberg spend the same per employee (roughly), but Penn State costs twice as much because they have so many more non-academic staff per student.

What do these 24,000 non-academic staff do?

Well you have 48 executives, (the president earns over a million per year in salary) all the way down to armies of bureaucrats.

If you want to know what those bureaucrats do, look at their jobs page (https://psu.jobs/jobs).

I found some gems: (All full time jobs)

  * Military Marketing Manager
  * Workforce Education Outreach Coordinator
  * Student Advocacy Specialist
  * Proposal and Award Generalist
  * Coordinator for Academic Success

Then take a gander at the Heidelberg jobs page: https://adb.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/info/INFO_LS$.Startup

Night and day difference.

   II. Years to completion

Once you limit your staff, you can also limit the amount of education you provide. Do you need your students to spend 6 years studying majors or can you have a slimmed down curriculum?

In Germany you finish in 3 years. That cuts costs in half over a 6 year time horizon. There are fewer electives outside of your main area of study, fewer optional courses, etc.

   III Stricter Entrance Requirements

Having an aggressive schedule requires restricting yourself to good students. It also eliminates wasted resources on studies where students drop out or don't finish. Heidelberg is very selective. Penn State is also selective in some sense, but not nearly as academically selective.

So these three tips is why in Germany you can provide an undergrad education for about 30-40K total, and it takes 3 years, whereas in the US it costs 30-40K per year and can take 4-6 years.

So those are some things you can do to cut costs.