It's important to put numbers in perspective. Every US citizen spends $98k over their expected lifetime on the military, for example. An average Swedish citizen spends $46k on state funded university and higher education over their expected lifetime (which is only slightly higher).
That said, it should be obvious that the Sweden model doesn't suit conditions in the US (one is a small country in Northern Europe, one is almost a continent), but one should be able to discuss these things without the straw man of how state spending is impossible in the US. After all, military spending is possible, and that is probably the most socialistic system of them all, in the sense that it is state planned and politically mandated.
If you look at the historic context of military vs. education spending, I don't think it's a straw man at all to point the difficulty of raising non-defense spending. In fact, the difficulty of raising taxes in the US is just put in more stark lighting when in perspective of the amounts spent on the military vs. everything else.
I'm not saying state spending is impossible, just that raising it for non-military items is exceedingly difficult. That's not the only reason why the US university system is worse in x way than y country's, but when we're discussing public funding of universities we have to acknowledge the political and fiscal realities of trying to do something about it. I say that when accounting for those realities and the difference in public funding levels for education and other programs, it's no surprise that we have students in debt.
I took the military speding figures from worldbank.org, and higher education spending from the Swedish national budget for 2015. Population and life expectancy figures from Wikipedia.
That said, it should be obvious that the Sweden model doesn't suit conditions in the US (one is a small country in Northern Europe, one is almost a continent), but one should be able to discuss these things without the straw man of how state spending is impossible in the US. After all, military spending is possible, and that is probably the most socialistic system of them all, in the sense that it is state planned and politically mandated.