Germany has one of the lowest tuition fees
statista.com
statista.com
Why leave out private universities I wonder?
Because it's not really a well thought out article. It looks more geared towards low value / low effort content that can be shared easily to make controversial (and therefore spread more) social media posts.
The non prestigious private universities whose lack of value is not yet known among its customers are the ones that cause problems for kids getting stuck with $60k+ per year annual costs.
When people talk about tons of student loan debt, they are invariably including graduate students getting professional degrees, like law and medicine. The average student loan debt after medical school is ~266k. But compared to the earning potential of a doctor (starting salaries between $200k and $500k), that isn't some unrecoverable debt load. The only people really screwed are the ones who decide they don't want to be a doctor a couple years in.
https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt#by-educa...
If the bar to get that money was as high as the one to get a mortgage from the bank, universities couldn't simply raise the fees because most students wouldn't be able to pay.
In New York City, public university tuition is $0.
You can earn ACE accredited college credits online very cheaply. I’ve know people who earned 60 credits (a 4-year bachelors in 120 credits) in a year for $150 in total. Saylor.org is $25 per 3-credit course. Sophia.org is $80 per month. Study.com is $200 month and offers thousands of courses. You don’t even need a high school diploma to get started.
My advice to smart kids around the world: Learn English, get your GED, take IELTS/TOEFL, earn 60-90 ACE credits online, and complete your bachelor’s degree in 1-2 years. The earlier the better.
a degree is fairly affordable in the US. you can do first 2 years at a community college for no more than $2k/year and then can do the last two at a state university for 9-20k/yr.
if you can get a degree that actually returns you money through an enhanced wage then you can pay that off no problem.
I'm not sure which community colleges you are going to. When my wife went to CUNY BMCC it was on the order of ~$2400/semester, so roughly $4800/year. Still not too unreasonable, but more than twice what you were saying.
Granted, this is NYC, not known for being super cheap, but I didn't think that CUNY was considered absurdly expensive either. Upon checking, the local community college where I grew up (the Orlando area) is about $1500/semester, so about $3000 a year, assuming you take summers off [2].
[1] https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/students/bursar/tuition-and-fees/
[2] https://net1.valenciacollege.edu/future-students/financial-a...
https://www.dallascollege.edu/paying-for-college/cost-tuitio...
Even twice what I was saying is a pretty low amount compared to a private university at 60k/year.
I don't disagree with your thesis, regardless. If you do something with the CUNY system, you're still on the hook for <$10/year (at least for tuition, rent+food is a different story). A total investment of ~$50-60k total cost is definitely worth it from an economic perspective. With the exception of eccentrics like me, generally speaking the high-paying jobs are gatekept behind academia, meaning that the tuition would pay for itself within 2-3 years, easily.
It's not like I'm some hypergenius or anything (far from it), I'm just somewhat of a self-learner and tend to do alright in whiteboard interviews.
New grads are pretty undifferentiated except for university prestige so that's a rough time to compete if you're from a less prestigious school or no school.
You take out loans so you can pay for school, pay for room and board, and have enough money to buy toiletries and what not.
if we take a look a few pretty common public colleges that people from my class went to:
BGSU [1] - ~$28,500/year x 4 years = $115,000
Kent [2] - ~$30,000/year x 4 years = $120,000
In all fairness there’s financial aid, and scholarships, and plenty of ways to decrease costs (living off campus, or even living with your parents and commuting, if you live close enough and have/can afford a car). Or attending a 2 year college and transferring.
Now imagine if you went to a private college (rumored to be a “better” education). An example near me:
Case Western Reserve [3] - ~75,000/ year x 4 years = $300,000
Now on top of all that, remember that student loans are still loans, and as such have interest. So while you can defer payments on the loans while you’re still in school, interest still accrues on those loans for 4 years.
And that’s just for an undergraduate degree. Someone with a masters has an additional two years of schooling, and more for a doctorate.
[1] https://www.bgsu.edu/financial-aid/about-aid/cost-of-attenda...
[2] https://www.kent.edu/financialaid/tuition-and-other-costs
[3] https://case.edu/financialaid/undergraduates/cost-undergradu...
https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c...
Edit: I also wonder what the living costs in other countries is. Do students in Germany pay for all their expenses too? Books, housing, food? Because your costs for a year are going to be another 15k or more, unless you can live and eat at home and walk to school.
With that money people are usually able to get an apartment or at least a room in a shared apartment and pay for food and books.
I've never understood this - don't universities in the US have libraries? Why does everyone need to buy their own books?
At my university they had one copy of every required or recommended text book per student in the library, so you could all check them out for the duration of your course. Why don't they do that in the US?
> negligible, maybe 5-7 books under 100€ each
That's... $700!!!
And yes, what's wrong with about 100$ per year? (my degree was 9 semesters)
18k a quarter for tuition alone.
Second, $9k is the average for an in-state public college. It is much higher for out of state public, or private institutions.
For example, my undergraduate Alma Mater, a New York State University, charges 7K per year in-state, 25K out-of-state. Which one of those is factored into the average cited here?
Furthermore, what percentage of students actually pay this tuition? Poor students get financial aid from the government and the university, good students get academic scholarships - all the way up to a free ride. Are those discounts reflected in the averages?
And, direct tuition is not the full story of the cost of education. For example, while it looks like a NY student can get a good deal on State education, it's possible that their family's life-time tax bill to support education far exceeds the savings. Likewise, if German tuition seems cheap - where is the money coming from? Germans must be paying for it in some other way.
The thing that matters the most is: how affordable is a college education to someone. Let's say I am a New York resident with good grades and I can get a half-ride tuition (3.5K/year) at a very good State School, the fact that I could also go to NYU (50k/year) or Columbia (61k/year) is irrelevant to my affordability. If I chose to go in to 240K debt to go to Columbia, that's my choice and my problem I could have gone to Stony Brook and pay 14K for 4 years for a solid education.
And finally, there's the elephant in the room that not all degrees are the same, but somehow they cost the same. If I get a highly relevant degree (let's say, Engineering) then even the 240K student debt can be easily paid off in a few years of full time work, and launch me into a great career (though, the Stony Brook degree would too.) On the other hand, the fact that Columbia would likewise happily bill you 240K for a soft-degree that will never lead to a good job is a fricking crime.
Tax-financed, obviously.
A big difference here is that non-university career paths seem far better accepted than in the USA.
Obviously (as in my New York example.) I am just making the point that this stuff costs people whether it shows up in the article or not.
> A big difference here is that non-university career paths seem far better accepted than in the USA.
I actually think this is one of those things where following "what's acceptable" is going to hurt people, as it often does. For example, there's plumber in my town, one of the things he does is helps people drain their sprinkler systems for the winter. $70 a pop for 20 mins of work, so $210 an hour. I would be very surprised if he has a degree.
Meanwhile, someone can have a $240K degree from Columbia in something totally useless and be working in retail for minimum wage. To some degree this person is "more acceptable" because he went to college, but in a real sense this person is powerless, not just despite their degree but in part because of it. That's not a sustainable situation and I can't see this kind of thing continue.
As a side not, it's funny that we sometimes make fun of politicians that have support among non-college educated adults. But in my mind, I am much more impressed with someone that my plumber thinks is good, vs the 240k-in-debt Columbia grad.
But for some universities and some subjects that is also true for Germany.
Once you've mastered that, it's very cheap (or free, if you are an EU citizen) to study here: https://studieren.univie.ac.at/en/tuition-fee/amount-eueeach... Living in Vienna is also quite affordable, at least compared to Berlin or London.
An educated populace without debt serfs is more important though.
Sounds good right?
Well... actually... not that great if you are ambitious, because it means that Austrian universities are over crowded. It is extremely common to see "long term" students, essentially people who study for 10+ years so they get state benefits as a student. Ambitious people will struggle to complete their studies in the minimum required time (e.g. 3 years for a Bachelor's), because overcrowding means that there are long waiting lists for exams. Some students need to enlist to a waiting list for an exam before even joining the university if they want to have a chance to do an exam in time so that they can finish within the 3 years. It's just complete bonkers.
Of course, because the EU is led by fucking geniuses (not), they thought it would be a good idea if any EU citizen is allowed to study in any EU country, meaning that Austrian universities are not only overcrowded, but overcrowded by Germans who don't want to pay tuition fees in their home country. It's easy for them because we speak the same language and Austrian students miss out on spaces and miss out on exam opportunities forcing them to study much longer than needed.
Honestly, it's a perfect example of how two populist headlines such as
- free tuition fees
- any EU citizen can study in any EU country
sound great on the news and abroad when you want to make your country/EU look good but in reality are a complete disaster.
I would have preferred to pay some fees which then would have meant that I could have had a normal university experience, but instead I didn't finish my degree at all because of those dumb socialist-populist policies which put me in the difficult situation of either aborting my studies and finding a job because my dad died, my mother was ill and I had to help out or study for an extra 2 years and struggle for the most basic things in life.
Also: raising tuition to prevent poor people from getting educated is not a cool way to prevent overcrowded universities. Proper financing and staffing is.
Hmm, downvoted. Stupid question? Irrelevant? To go from the government paying £4000 a year for a students free degree to the student paying £10,000 a year still seems odd to me.