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Comment by sheepmullet | Hacker News Reader

On point 1) if the average salary in Chile is less than $5k/year then it costs more than a years salary to pay for a years schooling. That is incredibly expensive.

By contrast in Australia it's around $10-12k/year for a local and the average full time wage is $75k/year!

If Chilean education was as cheap as Australia's then a good education would cost less than $1k/year.

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You are right, my bad. Actual average salary is USD 10k/year. Also notice the USD 5k/year is tuition for an engineering degree (2nd most expensive - only to med school) at the best universities, so it's pretty much one of the most expensive degrees you can get in Chile.

Also, it is really easy to get a low-interest student loan (which a lot of people don't even pay).

My guess is that access to education in Australia is definitely better than in Chile, but I wouldn't say education in Chile is the most expensive in the world.

Access to education in Australia is definitely better - for most courses entry is egalitarian - students are ranked and preferences orders determine what courses you get offered (it's very different to the US system - you nominate the course you want to take, BS, BA, including the major area and while you can transfer later, relatively few do). Obviously art and music courses often have an audition requirement, and exceptionally high demand or courses deemed to have a desire for 'suitable' people (without getting into a debate about that), such as medicine may also have an interview requirement.

However, the general philosophy is the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. This is a fee that is largely flat, only paid on graduation, as an increased income tax requirement (a few percent more), if and only if your salary is above a threshold. Drop below that and you're no longer paying on your HECS debt. However, you can also voluntarily opt to pre-pay your debt for varying discounts. When I went to school (mid 90s), this fee was $1800/year. Any course at any university, from liberal arts at a country college to medicine or law at the most prestigious of institutions.

For the interest of those unfamiliar with the scheme, HECS-HELP is structured as an income-contingent loan, albeit one with an inflation-linked indexation rather than a real rate of interest.

There's no longer a discount for paying fees up front: http://studyassist.gov.au/sites/studyassist/news/pages/chang...

For the record:

According to NESI 2013

Working population salaries in Chile, according to NEST 2013 (http://www.fundacionsol.cl/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Verdad...): * 2k/year or less: 13,8% * 2k-3k/year: 5,2 % * 3k-4,2k/year: 14,1% * 4,2k-6k/year: 20,5 %

53,5% of working population get less than 5k/year.

These are the rates of universidad de chile, the principal state sponsored university in chile year 2015 (http://www.uchile.cl/portal/admision-y-matriculas/aranceles-...):

Medicine? 8k/year Architecture? 5,6k/year Biochemistry? 5.8k/year

I don't know if chilean education is the most expensive in the world. I just know the data delivered in these comments is wrong.

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