[Chyzwar]

These kids that drink and smoke pot are paying in personal debt, the taxpayer is not really subsidizing this (at least based on what I was reading). For most career paths outside a small portion of the technology, college is the only way.

Part of the problem is that the US is not spending enough taxpayer money into education. If the US spends a portion of it military budget 570B$ to enhance education spending 70B$ problem could be massively reduced. To compare Germany military spending 50B€ and education 130B€.

[rlanday]

The US spends plenty of money on education. If the data on this site is accurate, local, state, and federal spending makes up about 6.35% of US GDP: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending

vs. it looks like about 4.8% from Germany. Maybe there’s some discrepancy in how those numbers are calculated, but they’re at least not wildly different.

[Chyzwar]

Universities in Germany are mostly free with generous system of funding for poor students.

From attached link most of the spending is on state and local level.

>Federal education spending: The federal government had little involvement in education in the early 20th century. This changed in the 1930s when federal education spending increased from less than 0.05 percent of GDP to over 0.3 percent of GDP. Federal education spending decreased during World War II but then increased to a peak of 1.03 percent of GDP in 1949 as it funded education for veterans in the GI Bill. Federal education spending declined in the 1950s to 0.3 percent of GDP, but began an increase in the mid 1960s reaching a peak of 1.2 percent of GDP in 1979. Thereafter federal education spending declined to about 0.6 to 0.7 percent of GDP in the 1980s and 1990s before increasing modestly to nearly 0.8 percent of GDP in the 2000s.

> In the early 2010s federal education spending declined to 0.7 percent in 2015, and is expected to be 0.5 percent GDP by 2020.