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Comment by joshuahaglund | Hacker News Reader

They averaged the entire us University system, and only covered in state tuition at public university. In-state varies greatly, from $16,070 in NH, $14,440 in PA to $5,220 in WY. Out of state tuition is 2 to 4 times as expensive. I think 6 figure debt is often from private or advanced degrees.

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.

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Can only speak from personal experience (and friends and people I studied with, of course) but yes, it used to be pretty common (I graduated in 2010) to simply study in the town you grew up and live at home until you're done. Even with 5 year degrees, so until 25. Of course with a little financial support you could also get a small apartment or share one. And a lot of universities have dorms, even when they're not campus universities, then you might be living 5-15 km away from most of your classes.

Government lends you up to ~880€ a month interest free if your parents earn less than 35k€ and gradually less until 75k€ parent household income. After university you have 5 years time until loan payments starts. Total payback is capped at 10k even if you have received more than that. If you can pay it back in full with one payment you only pay ~7.3k.

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.

> Books

I've never understood this - don't universities in the US have libraries? Why does everyone need to buy their own books?

I think that highly depends on your subject. I know people that said it was expected to have your own copy of X,Y,Z because you needed it all the time and not just to look something up once a semester. Biology for example. For me with CS it also wouldn't have made sense to use the ones I bought in a library, because everyone would've needed them at the same time. But I can't complain, the cost was negligible, maybe 5-7 books under 100€ each, over the whole timespan.

> because you needed it all the time

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!!!

See, in our library they had maybe 5-10 copies for 100 students, so I never heard of something like this. Also some of those books I've been referencing again even after finishing my studies so I'm glad I have them.

And yes, what's wrong with about 100$ per year? (my degree was 9 semesters)

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