Honestly I don't know whether or not that's a better system. Whether students come out with a degree or a trade, they don't come out with debt. It's trading a degree of social mobility for economic gains, but in the US you can find yourself left out of either choice.
As for cost, $40,000 is the typical private school. Absent the top tiers, there's no reason to pay that price over a public University, where tuition in most states hovers around $10k per year. And if you do 2 years of community college first and finish up at a 4 year school, you can cut the average cost per year down to something like $7k.
Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices. Choosing the massive debt of a private school, or paying and extra $12k per year to live in a dorm "for the experience". That's how you run up $100,000 in debt before you even get a job. Don't have the money without taking out loans? Stay local, commute, find friends that live on campus and crash at their rooms every once in a while. College is expensive partly because our society treats it as a right of passage rather than an educational experience.
I am not sure families are the ones to blame here. Astronomical tuition and loan interests that cannot be forgotten in bankruptcy is a predatory combo.
In the European countries you mention no student start their professional like with $50k-100k in unforgivable debt.
The US system sells dreams that don't come true, and you blame them for believing that they can do better in their life than their parents by getting an education? Absurd.
I heard the last part is changing thanks to "Gesamtschulen" (schools with all 3 tracks and a way to switch after you finish your track).
But anyway, it’s not as if that’s the only way. Vocational training is another way to go to college.
This is disingenuous, as there are many universities that do require first year students to be on campus, with limited exceptions.
> Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices.
Sure, but the impression most families and arguably American society at large have (which is a mix of truth, "belief", and maybe self fulfilling prophecy) is that the more prestigious schools, which also tend to be private, will land you a better job by virtue of the name or networking. It's harder to turn down an opportunity with that in mind, especially as student debt is hard to really grasp the magnitude of as an 18 year old never having dealt with that much money.
And I get it, and the value. But most people would be better served with an alternative system.
I'd amend this to "the possibility of friendship".
I'll add that I got a professional friendship from college that's lasted sixteen years so far - very much the kind of thing the GP was talking about.
Both of us were commuters doing the last two years of our degrees at a commuter school.
We didn't need to pay for dorms to meet each other and develop friendships.
It is a football team with a school attached though.
This is a degree that most likely has minimum wage earning potential.
You can go to a great in-state public university for $6/yr or less.
Pedigrees are dumb. Humanities degrees for more than $6k/yr are absurd.
Georgia Tech offers a fully accredited online masters CS program for $6k as the total program cost, and their teaching is world-class.
"Pedigree", and other terms used to refer to the same concept, are nothing more than the reflection of the track record of an institution regarding scientific quality and training.
"Pedigree" also reflects a pre-screening of candidates with regards to academic and technical potential.
It might be true that I won't become the next Niels Bohr if I attend the same universities he attended or lectured in, but let's not fool ourselves into assuming that you'll learn the same from a course taught by amateur underperforming lecturers than what you would from a course taught by nobel laureates to a room of top-performers.
Also, I am not convinced your average Nobel laureates is a particularly good teacher. If anything, from experience, research focused professors often see teaching as a chore and it has a clear impact on the quality of their teaching. If we're talking about teaching calculus 101, I'd much rather have a no-name professor who is a good pedagogue and loves teaching than a Fields medal winner. Of course, in reality, the fact you were taught by $famous professor is probably more valuable than what you actually learned in the class.
Do you really think you're getting a full course taught by a Nobel Laureate? Do you really think the room is full of top-performers? Sure, the average might be better than a state college, but not much better (with some exceptions, surely)
It helps to recall that taxes pay for this 'free' service. American tuition has risen pretty much in lock step with state funding cuts, which itself is often motivated by a combination of partisan politics, constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, federally prohibited bankruptcies, and negative economic shocks.
If you pay $40k a year in the US and think that you are paying for an education, then, yes, you will be disappointed.
For schools at that price point, you are paying for the network. Whether the network delivers or not is a different issue — sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very context-specific.
It's just a matter of time until we nationalize everything and finally get a modern system. It's inevitable, the US university system just isn't competitive anymore for actual US citizens.
Where's the great wealth, economic growth, high productivity, and high incomes? The majority of Europe is languishing very badly and it's getting worse by the year.
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe.
It's not free at all, and everyone knows it's not free.
Let's see you do the final tally, which includes income across a lifetime vs tax rates.
Europeans pay epic taxes in part for that 'free' college. The US middle class pays very low taxes by comparison. That has to be factored into the equation.
The US middle class is richer than the middle class in: Sweden, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Greece, Poland and Czechia among numerous others.
The US median wealth figure is comparable to Norway.
I think it's important to restate that: the US middle class is richer than the middle class in Sweden, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark - you know, just four of the supposedly best off nations in world history.
So where are the great results for that non-free education?
Also citations?
By how much do you think are European taxes higher than US taxes?
Isn't this because US cities (esp. the dilapidated ones) are in big part storage for the poor, and the middle class lives in suburbs?
A middle class Dutchman is way better off than a middle class American. I am so glad I left the USA for the promised land.