[TheLoafOfBread]

Exactly. I see a lot of people on HN are often bashing European public universities, but advantage of those universities is that you are essentially judged by a third party which does not have any monetary reason to let you pass. You either know, or you are kicked from exams.

[fiat_fandango]

I think the bashing comes in when the topic of rigor / how good the university is comes up. For instance, how do you equitably discriminate to only allow smarter people into universities with an intentionally elevated amount of rigor?

This is inherently discriminatory since ironically enough the root of all inequality is endowed intelligence. The value of giving away free resources of high value is going to get messy, it's why the competition for scholarships to top universities is incredibly fraught with fraud.

[TheLoafOfBread]

The "how good is university" is based on some arbitrary metric, which does not tell anything to the student, but works on foreign students see PolyMatter The Chinese Student Crisis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig

It has even lower value for Europeans, because even if some university in Paris would be THE BEST in the world, it still will have only a national character. For example some guy from Poland is not going to study there, simply because when you are 20 years old, then you can barely speak English on A2, but at that case, to actually understand and learn, you would need to speak French on B2 (of course, we can find rare exceptions).

So in the end you are choosing your school from less than dozen national universities (could be less or more, depends on size of your country) and then you will decide by their program - Do you want to study agriculture university with a program on genetical engineering of plants? Do you want to study technical university with a program of computer science? etc.

All those universities are national (public), there are also some private universities, but you will go in those if you are mandated to have diploma (i.e. some governmental positions). The problem with private universities is that non-governmental employers are not taking them seriously and they will look at you as on somebody who accidentally bought his diploma with his newspapers.

[Ekaros]

Depending on funding system they have quite a lot reasons to pass people. Namely that they are also paid for each graduate by state.