If people are halfway through, a motivating thing to keep them going is the money they've already invested in it.
I bet you'll see a significantly higher dropout rate with free tuition. Like we see in public high school.
Private engineering schools tend to be seen as schools for those who couldn’t get in public schools but have parents with enough money to pay the fees.
So I disagree with you, keep in mind that there’s a significant barrier of admission to get accepted.
From the stats I could find, there's a drop out rate of around 20% between the first year and second year. Then 85% success rate in getting in an engineering school.
Once they are in an engineering school, the drop out rate is very low (both for private and public schools).
There are some engineering school that include the preparatory classes (we call that integrated prepa, an example is the National Institute of Applied Sciences INSA my alma mater) during the first 2 years, in that case the drop out rate is around 20% during the first 2 years and then less than 1% after that.
For both type of preparatory classes (integrated or not), students who drop out change major to something else and get to transfer credits to their new major.
For medicines, it's different. Until 2020 everyone could do the first year of medicine but only 20% would go on to the second year. Students were allowed to redo it once and then had to change major. There are no private medicine cursus in France. This has now changed and I'm not familiar with the new system.
With majors like liberal arts, etc... University is free and the drop out rate seems to be almost 60%. So yes, for majors with easy admission and free tuition (very little skin in the game) drop out rates are high.
But for highly selective programs where admission is difficult, there's very little drop out once students actually get in.
I can see what you mean about the halfway point. Maybe undergrad came easily, and at the halfway point, the student realizes that medical school simply isn't a good fit, or it's more work than they thought it would be. So they drop out. This is probably a good thing, to prevent people becoming doctors who don't have the chops or the attitude for it. Unfortunately, the school does lose some money on a candidate they ought to have filtered out in the interview.
Happily it's an empirical question, and we can circle back in a few years to see if the drop out rate increased or not. Maybe the drop out rate increases at first, and then the entrance interview becomes more stringent.
This is not what medical school is like from the people I know.
Nobody has a bigger stick up their butts about how important their work is than medical students. Computer programmers (despite what reading comments here on HN would make you think) are at best a distant, distant second.
And those are people who are paying tuition.
Med school students aren’t competitive type A driven psychos because they’re writing tuition checks.
Another effect we see these days is the government education loans encourage people to sign up for expensive and useless degrees, and then they are apparently shocked that they have to pay back those loans. Hence the push for loan "forgiveness".
Without these loans, I bet there would be far less demand for these degrees with no market value.
True, it was possible (barely) at the time to work part time during the school year and full time during the summer to pay the bills. Borrowing money still (at least used to) means you had to pay it back.
Universities today give out free rides to various groups of students for various reasons. I'd expect their dropout rate to be considerably higher.
BTW, I was offered a free ride by ASU. I couldn't escape the feeling that because it was offered for free, it wasn't worth as much. It's just human nature at work. I am sadly amused by all the people that deny these effects.