It depends heavily on where you go, but large and popular public schools can still be very expensive in the US. Here's an example of the cost breakdown at one such school:

http://admissions.missouri.edu/costs-and-aid/costs/index.php

Even more popular public schools like UCLA tend to be about $10k/year more:

http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/budget.htm

Just to give you an idea of the cost of, say, Harvard...

https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/cost...

Do note that extremely wealthy private institutions like Harvard tend to be correspondingly generous with financial aid, so the number there is likely not representative of what you'd actually pay unless you came from a very rich family (as a fair number of Harvard students do).

It used to be pretty reasonable. When I attended Ga Tech (a state school) a couple decades ago, it was a few thousand a year to cover tuition, books, food, dorms. I can't remember tuition exactly, but I think it was in the neighborhood of $1500-1800 a year. (By comparison, MIT and Harvard were in the neighborhood of $16,000 a year at the time).

Then there was a period where Georgia had a lottery-funded scholarship that would cover your tuition fully at state schools if you kept a good GPA. I've heard in recent years that it's slipped due to declining lottery revenues, but I'm not sure.

Looking now, I see it's $9,000 a year just for tuition. An estimated $25,000 per year overall. Big increase, though it has been a long time.

That's a lot of money for in-state attendance. When I went it wasn't really a burden on most people to cover their kid's cost at Ga state schools. Now I think it really would be.

Yes, but Public Universities tend to be much cheaper than the other options.

The University I attended charges $6,000 per year in tuition, plus about another $1,000 in fees. Of course, you'd have to pay housing and food costs on top of that, which if you live on campus, ends up being about $10,000 a year, or less if you live off campus.

Yes, you end up paying 20k a year instead of 40k a year.

There seems to be a confusion of words here. You seem to make a difference between tuition and tuition fees while the Wikipedia [1] article suggests that those terms mean the same in different English dialects.

As for Germany: almost all public Universities still take fees (usually around 100 Euros per semester, tax refundable). Tuition was a new thing and is what has been abandoned again.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_payments

What is Oakland's Rough cost per semester? I live in the area and attend their security conferences from the outside looking in it seems like a decent school.

I already work as an software developer but a degree doesn't hurt my career options.

When was this? What was the price for your undergrad?