[wojcech]

This sentiment is so bizarre from a European perspective. So the only thing that stops people from getting an education willy nilly is student debt? Or American engineers are all better in some respects than German engineers because of their debt?

[usrusr]

What I (as a fellow European who considers the American student loan craze equally bizarre) read into the "struggle" part of nightski's post is that people approach a given education opportunity very differently knowing that it is costing them (or, probably even stronger in most cases: their parents) a lot of money, vs. knowing that it is free. I sure hope that I would have crunched harder during that time knowing that it was a crazy expensive bet and not just the opportunity cost of not entering the workforce early.

What I am not so sure is wether that hard crunch would have actually been better. I suspect that without the more freewheeling approach of European universities, I would have gone even deeper into the pointlessness of learning for the grade instead of learning for the education.

Generally speaking, my impression is that many people wildly overestimate the per-head cost of low intensity university education. Without artificially inflated budgets (driven by the misuse of tuition height as an indicator of academic quality), a few lecture halls, some professors and the usual lower echelons of academia who are basically donating their time for peanuts and the chance to occasionally publish seems to be an absolute bargain compared to other programmes designed for keeping people off the streets.

[nightski]

I never really said any of that.

The reality is that you can get a really good college education for rather cheap in the U.S. if you are smart about it. I could of gone to a local state college for 1/10th the tuition of a private school and received an education at a very similar level.

I just feel that a free for all education system (ala Bernie Sanders) would be detrimental. Having things be somewhat exclusive and require some amount of effort is not necessarily a bad thing. Germany itself imposes exams for example (although I don't know how difficult they actually are personally).

[DasIch]

Germany doesn't impose any exams at all. The only limiting factor is that you qualify for university and maybe your grade, if the number of applicants requires it.

There are no exams that need to be passed, no essays need to be written or anything of the sort.

[lentil_soup]

Depending on the course/university there's limited space, of course. The problem is when this "exclusivity" that you mention is purely based on who can pay, that is what's detrimental.

[cpursley]

I'm really not sure why you're getting downvotes. If I could go back and change my education path, I'd absolutely go the community college route for two years then complete my education at state college.

[dagw]

Having things be somewhat exclusive and require some amount of effort is not necessarily a bad thing.

Getting into your first choice program at your first choice university often requires a lot of effort, and the people who graduate from those programs are often part of a somewhat exclusive group. It's just that the effort required is entirely on your academic and intellectual qualifications rather than financial and persona connections.