[greenyoda]

Those universities need a lot of money: professors don't work for free and buildings don't maintain themselves. You can be sure that you'll be paying for your college education out of your taxes for the rest of your working life.

It would be interesting to analyze what free colleges cost the average taxpayer, and to compare that with what non-free colleges cost in the U.S. Do countries that offer free college education offer the public a way to find out the itemized expenses of publicly funded universities?

[noir_lord]

But an educated population is a net benefit for a society so you’d have to factor the societal benefits as well.

In the US the professors appear to often work a lot closer to free than the administrators do anyway.

[kungato]

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp some nice numbers here