I'm genuinely surprised that the US is not at the top of the list. Can anyone explain why England's tuition is so high (or has risen so much as the article says)?
It is easy to rise fast as a percentage if you start recently from zero... Why they ended up so high in absolute terms is hard to say, the cynics say in an aging democracy people vote to soak the young...
In the UK where did all the extra money go? It's a mystery!
Hmm, downvoted. Stupid question? Irrelevant? To go from the government paying £4000 a year for a students free degree to the student paying £10,000 a year still seems odd to me.
I often hear about Americans having as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt… how do they get so much debt when their fees are only $9k a year? Where is the rest of their debt coming from?
That chart is for public universities (of which America has many excellent ones). Americans with tons of college debt are likely to have attended an overpriced private institution, and financed their room and board and books as well. That can add up to over $60k/year at prestigious private colleges and universities.
I guess comparing a country with a lot of private universities with a country with essentially no private universities doesn't give quite the whole story!
Because it's not really a well thought out article. It looks more geared towards low value / low effort content that can be shared easily to make controversial (and therefore spread more) social media posts.
The prestigious colleges offer generous subsidies so most that cannot afford $60k effectively have much lower tuition.
The non prestigious private universities whose lack of value is not yet known among its customers are the ones that cause problems for kids getting stuck with $60k+ per year annual costs.
I'm guessing they have lots of regular state universities with reasonable instate tuition to average out the very expensive ones. In the UK 100% of universities decided to charge the highest allowed amount and there are no scholarships or discounts.
Scholarships absolutely exist, it’s just often more expedient to give them as cash and allow the student to pay the loan down if they wish, given living expenses are often more of a barrier and the loan is on very generous terms.
They get cheap money to pay their tuition fees so private universities raise their prices.
If the bar to get that money was as high as the one to get a mortgage from the bank, universities couldn't simply raise the fees because most students wouldn't be able to pay.
you're only hearing about extreme examples of people getting worthless degrees from private universities fully financed.
a degree is fairly affordable in the US. you can do first 2 years at a community college for no more than $2k/year and then can do the last two at a state university for 9-20k/yr.
if you can get a degree that actually returns you money through an enhanced wage then you can pay that off no problem.
Yes, being a lawyer is an extreme example where you need both top grades and a top 20 rated school. I wouldn't recommend that career if your parents can't pay your way as the risk of not making it into a top legal firm even if you meet those requirements is still high.
Yeah no problem. I can't speak to every state school but I went to one that was easy to get into and had a highly rated computer science program with a lot of extra curricular clubs that made it easy to distinguish oneself.
I got a job at Apple as a dropout with, at the time, only some credits from Florida State University and Valencia Community College. I've also had interviews with Facebook and Google and Amazon. I'm not going to say that the school you go to doesn't matter, but I think that having good experience tends to matter more than anything else.
It's not like I'm some hypergenius or anything (far from it), I'm just somewhat of a self-learner and tend to do alright in whiteboard interviews.
I know people with no degree at FAANG. Best time to break in is after a few years in industry when you have some work accomplishments you can point to that indicate you are a high performer.
New grads are pretty undifferentiated except for university prestige so that's a rough time to compete if you're from a less prestigious school or no school.
> you can do first 2 years at a community college for no more than $2k/year
I'm not sure which community colleges you are going to. When my wife went to CUNY BMCC it was on the order of ~$2400/semester, so roughly $4800/year. Still not too unreasonable, but more than twice what you were saying.
Granted, this is NYC, not known for being super cheap, but I didn't think that CUNY was considered absurdly expensive either. Upon checking, the local community college where I grew up (the Orlando area) is about $1500/semester, so about $3000 a year, assuming you take summers off [2].
Fair enough...maybe I should have done school when I lived in Dallas!
I don't disagree with your thesis, regardless. If you do something with the CUNY system, you're still on the hook for <$10/year (at least for tuition, rent+food is a different story). A total investment of ~$50-60k total cost is definitely worth it from an economic perspective. With the exception of eccentrics like me, generally speaking the high-paying jobs are gatekept behind academia, meaning that the tuition would pay for itself within 2-3 years, easily.
Part of the US tuition fees being so high varies. Is it a public or private school in a LCOL, MCOL, or HCOL area? A public school like NYU(~$55k) is going to cost way more than UW- Madison (~$19k) even though they're both public colleges and have some prestige associated with attending there. A private college in my state is similar to NYU. Columbia University is $33k/semester. So yeah a 4-5 year degree is basically a mortgage in some places.
Mostly because the media discussion around tuition fees in the US is completely toxic and focuses on cases like students who have self-funded taught masters programs at elite-level private institutions.
I studied in Quebec, where my tuition fees were around 4000 CAD a year. However, I also had to pay for rent, food, and a basic standard of living. That added up to around 20,000 CAD a year at the time.
In the United States you can get a 4-year bachelor’s degree for less than $5000.
In New York City, public university tuition is $0.
You can earn ACE accredited college credits online very cheaply. I’ve know people who earned 60 credits (a 4-year bachelors in 120 credits) in a year for $150 in total. Saylor.org is $25 per 3-credit course. Sophia.org is $80 per month. Study.com is $200 month and offers thousands of courses. You don’t even need a high school diploma to get started.
My advice to smart kids around the world: Learn English, get your GED, take IELTS/TOEFL, earn 60-90 ACE credits online, and complete your bachelor’s degree in 1-2 years. The earlier the better.
Also, take CLEP tests. I'm not sure what the current price is, but I'm guessing it's in the neighborhood of $100. You can usually get 3 credits for passing the test.
The average student loan debt for a US undergraduate degree is ~$37k, which lines up with that $9k/year.
When people talk about tons of student loan debt, they are invariably including graduate students getting professional degrees, like law and medicine. The average student loan debt after medical school is ~266k. But compared to the earning potential of a doctor (starting salaries between $200k and $500k), that isn't some unrecoverable debt load. The only people really screwed are the ones who decide they don't want to be a doctor a couple years in.
Right but the structure of professional education for things like medicine and law is completely different in the UK from the US so an apples-to-apples comparison isn't easily possible.
They averaged the entire us University system, and only covered in state tuition at public university. In-state varies greatly, from $16,070 in NH, $14,440 in PA to $5,220 in WY. Out of state tuition is 2 to 4 times as expensive. I think 6 figure debt is often from private or advanced degrees.
Edit: I also wonder what the living costs in other countries is. Do students in Germany pay for all their expenses too? Books, housing, food? Because your costs for a year are going to be another 15k or more, unless you can live and eat at home and walk to school.
Government lends you up to ~880€ a month interest free if your parents earn less than 35k€ and gradually less until 75k€ parent household income. After university you have 5 years time until loan payments starts. Total payback is capped at 10k even if you have received more than that. If you can pay it back in full with one payment you only pay ~7.3k.
With that money people are usually able to get an apartment or at least a room in a shared apartment and pay for food and books.
I think that highly depends on your subject. I know people that said it was expected to have your own copy of X,Y,Z because you needed it all the time and not just to look something up once a semester. Biology for example. For me with CS it also wouldn't have made sense to use the ones I bought in a library, because everyone would've needed them at the same time. But I can't complain, the cost was negligible, maybe 5-7 books under 100€ each, over the whole timespan.
At my university they had one copy of every required or recommended text book per student in the library, so you could all check them out for the duration of your course. Why don't they do that in the US?
See, in our library they had maybe 5-10 copies for 100 students, so I never heard of something like this. Also some of those books I've been referencing again even after finishing my studies so I'm glad I have them.
And yes, what's wrong with about 100$ per year? (my degree was 9 semesters)
Can only speak from personal experience (and friends and people I studied with, of course) but yes, it used to be pretty common (I graduated in 2010) to simply study in the town you grew up and live at home until you're done. Even with 5 year degrees, so until 25. Of course with a little financial support you could also get a small apartment or share one. And a lot of universities have dorms, even when they're not campus universities, then you might be living 5-15 km away from most of your classes.
I could easily see someone racking up that much debt. It’s almost encouraged, as part of the whole “going to college experience”.
You take out loans so you can pay for school, pay for room and board, and have enough money to buy toiletries and what not.
if we take a look a few pretty common public colleges that people from my class went to:
BGSU [1] - ~$28,500/year x 4 years = $115,000
Kent [2] - ~$30,000/year x 4 years = $120,000
In all fairness there’s financial aid, and scholarships, and plenty of ways to decrease costs (living off campus, or even living with your parents and commuting, if you live close enough and have/can afford a car). Or attending a 2 year college and transferring.
Now imagine if you went to a private college (rumored to be a “better” education). An example near me:
Case Western Reserve [3] - ~75,000/ year x 4 years = $300,000
Now on top of all that, remember that student loans are still loans, and as such have interest. So while you can defer payments on the loans while you’re still in school, interest still accrues on those loans for 4 years.
And that’s just for an undergraduate degree. Someone with a masters has an additional two years of schooling, and more for a doctorate.
They say in Austria you don't even apply. You just turn up at any university and everyone is accepted. If you can't pass the exams you get washed out quite quickly though.
That's true for some less-attended studies, but wrong for STEM, medicine, economics, psychology, etc. For most of those you have entrance exams (with a literature list to study up front) where only a certain top percentile passes. The first one or two semesters are also quite brutal, to weed out even more underachievers.
I think Scotland deserves an honourable mention here. Bachelor’s degrees are free, under a scheme called “SAAS” (Might be home and EU only). Interestingly, people from England have to pay the same in Scotland as they do in England.
Well... actually... not that great if you are ambitious, because it means that Austrian universities are over crowded. It is extremely common to see "long term" students, essentially people who study for 10+ years so they get state benefits as a student. Ambitious people will struggle to complete their studies in the minimum required time (e.g. 3 years for a Bachelor's), because overcrowding means that there are long waiting lists for exams. Some students need to enlist to a waiting list for an exam before even joining the university if they want to have a chance to do an exam in time so that they can finish within the 3 years. It's just complete bonkers.
Of course, because the EU is led by fucking geniuses (not), they thought it would be a good idea if any EU citizen is allowed to study in any EU country, meaning that Austrian universities are not only overcrowded, but overcrowded by Germans who don't want to pay tuition fees in their home country. It's easy for them because we speak the same language and Austrian students miss out on spaces and miss out on exam opportunities forcing them to study much longer than needed.
Honestly, it's a perfect example of how two populist headlines such as
- free tuition fees
- any EU citizen can study in any EU country
sound great on the news and abroad when you want to make your country/EU look good but in reality are a complete disaster.
I would have preferred to pay some fees which then would have meant that I could have had a normal university experience, but instead I didn't finish my degree at all because of those dumb socialist-populist policies which put me in the difficult situation of either aborting my studies and finding a job because my dad died, my mother was ill and I had to help out or study for an extra 2 years and struggle for the most basic things in life.
A lot of German states don't have tuition and are not that overcrowded. So this can't be the whole story.
Also: raising tuition to prevent poor people from getting educated is not a cool way to prevent overcrowded universities. Proper financing and staffing is.
Education has quite opaque pricing which makes comparison difficult.
For example, my undergraduate Alma Mater, a New York State University, charges 7K per year in-state, 25K out-of-state. Which one of those is factored into the average cited here?
Furthermore, what percentage of students actually pay this tuition? Poor students get financial aid from the government and the university, good students get academic scholarships - all the way up to a free ride. Are those discounts reflected in the averages?
And, direct tuition is not the full story of the cost of education. For example, while it looks like a NY student can get a good deal on State education, it's possible that their family's life-time tax bill to support education far exceeds the savings. Likewise, if German tuition seems cheap - where is the money coming from? Germans must be paying for it in some other way.
The thing that matters the most is: how affordable is a college education to someone. Let's say I am a New York resident with good grades and I can get a half-ride tuition (3.5K/year) at a very good State School, the fact that I could also go to NYU (50k/year) or Columbia (61k/year) is irrelevant to my affordability. If I chose to go in to 240K debt to go to Columbia, that's my choice and my problem I could have gone to Stony Brook and pay 14K for 4 years for a solid education.
And finally, there's the elephant in the room that not all degrees are the same, but somehow they cost the same. If I get a highly relevant degree (let's say, Engineering) then even the 240K student debt can be easily paid off in a few years of full time work, and launch me into a great career (though, the Stony Brook degree would too.) On the other hand, the fact that Columbia would likewise happily bill you 240K for a soft-degree that will never lead to a good job is a fricking crime.
Obviously (as in my New York example.) I am just making the point that this stuff costs people whether it shows up in the article or not.
> A big difference here is that non-university career paths seem far better accepted than in the USA.
I actually think this is one of those things where following "what's acceptable" is going to hurt people, as it often does. For example, there's plumber in my town, one of the things he does is helps people drain their sprinkler systems for the winter. $70 a pop for 20 mins of work, so $210 an hour. I would be very surprised if he has a degree.
Meanwhile, someone can have a $240K degree from Columbia in something totally useless and be working in retail for minimum wage. To some degree this person is "more acceptable" because he went to college, but in a real sense this person is powerless, not just despite their degree but in part because of it. That's not a sustainable situation and I can't see this kind of thing continue.
As a side not, it's funny that we sometimes make fun of politicians that have support among non-college educated adults. But in my mind, I am much more impressed with someone that my plumber thinks is good, vs the 240k-in-debt Columbia grad.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadHmm, downvoted. Stupid question? Irrelevant? To go from the government paying £4000 a year for a students free degree to the student paying £10,000 a year still seems odd to me.
Why leave out private universities I wonder?
Because it's not really a well thought out article. It looks more geared towards low value / low effort content that can be shared easily to make controversial (and therefore spread more) social media posts.
The non prestigious private universities whose lack of value is not yet known among its customers are the ones that cause problems for kids getting stuck with $60k+ per year annual costs.
If the bar to get that money was as high as the one to get a mortgage from the bank, universities couldn't simply raise the fees because most students wouldn't be able to pay.
a degree is fairly affordable in the US. you can do first 2 years at a community college for no more than $2k/year and then can do the last two at a state university for 9-20k/yr.
if you can get a degree that actually returns you money through an enhanced wage then you can pay that off no problem.
It's not like I'm some hypergenius or anything (far from it), I'm just somewhat of a self-learner and tend to do alright in whiteboard interviews.
New grads are pretty undifferentiated except for university prestige so that's a rough time to compete if you're from a less prestigious school or no school.
I'm not sure which community colleges you are going to. When my wife went to CUNY BMCC it was on the order of ~$2400/semester, so roughly $4800/year. Still not too unreasonable, but more than twice what you were saying.
Granted, this is NYC, not known for being super cheap, but I didn't think that CUNY was considered absurdly expensive either. Upon checking, the local community college where I grew up (the Orlando area) is about $1500/semester, so about $3000 a year, assuming you take summers off [2].
[1] https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/students/bursar/tuition-and-fees/
[2] https://net1.valenciacollege.edu/future-students/financial-a...
https://www.dallascollege.edu/paying-for-college/cost-tuitio...
Even twice what I was saying is a pretty low amount compared to a private university at 60k/year.
I don't disagree with your thesis, regardless. If you do something with the CUNY system, you're still on the hook for <$10/year (at least for tuition, rent+food is a different story). A total investment of ~$50-60k total cost is definitely worth it from an economic perspective. With the exception of eccentrics like me, generally speaking the high-paying jobs are gatekept behind academia, meaning that the tuition would pay for itself within 2-3 years, easily.
Second, $9k is the average for an in-state public college. It is much higher for out of state public, or private institutions.
In New York City, public university tuition is $0.
You can earn ACE accredited college credits online very cheaply. I’ve know people who earned 60 credits (a 4-year bachelors in 120 credits) in a year for $150 in total. Saylor.org is $25 per 3-credit course. Sophia.org is $80 per month. Study.com is $200 month and offers thousands of courses. You don’t even need a high school diploma to get started.
My advice to smart kids around the world: Learn English, get your GED, take IELTS/TOEFL, earn 60-90 ACE credits online, and complete your bachelor’s degree in 1-2 years. The earlier the better.
When people talk about tons of student loan debt, they are invariably including graduate students getting professional degrees, like law and medicine. The average student loan debt after medical school is ~266k. But compared to the earning potential of a doctor (starting salaries between $200k and $500k), that isn't some unrecoverable debt load. The only people really screwed are the ones who decide they don't want to be a doctor a couple years in.
https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt#by-educa...
18k a quarter for tuition alone.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c...
Edit: I also wonder what the living costs in other countries is. Do students in Germany pay for all their expenses too? Books, housing, food? Because your costs for a year are going to be another 15k or more, unless you can live and eat at home and walk to school.
With that money people are usually able to get an apartment or at least a room in a shared apartment and pay for food and books.
I've never understood this - don't universities in the US have libraries? Why does everyone need to buy their own books?
At my university they had one copy of every required or recommended text book per student in the library, so you could all check them out for the duration of your course. Why don't they do that in the US?
> negligible, maybe 5-7 books under 100€ each
That's... $700!!!
And yes, what's wrong with about 100$ per year? (my degree was 9 semesters)
You take out loans so you can pay for school, pay for room and board, and have enough money to buy toiletries and what not.
if we take a look a few pretty common public colleges that people from my class went to:
BGSU [1] - ~$28,500/year x 4 years = $115,000
Kent [2] - ~$30,000/year x 4 years = $120,000
In all fairness there’s financial aid, and scholarships, and plenty of ways to decrease costs (living off campus, or even living with your parents and commuting, if you live close enough and have/can afford a car). Or attending a 2 year college and transferring.
Now imagine if you went to a private college (rumored to be a “better” education). An example near me:
Case Western Reserve [3] - ~75,000/ year x 4 years = $300,000
Now on top of all that, remember that student loans are still loans, and as such have interest. So while you can defer payments on the loans while you’re still in school, interest still accrues on those loans for 4 years.
And that’s just for an undergraduate degree. Someone with a masters has an additional two years of schooling, and more for a doctorate.
[1] https://www.bgsu.edu/financial-aid/about-aid/cost-of-attenda...
[2] https://www.kent.edu/financialaid/tuition-and-other-costs
[3] https://case.edu/financialaid/undergraduates/cost-undergradu...
But for some universities and some subjects that is also true for Germany.
An educated populace without debt serfs is more important though.
Once you've mastered that, it's very cheap (or free, if you are an EU citizen) to study here: https://studieren.univie.ac.at/en/tuition-fee/amount-eueeach... Living in Vienna is also quite affordable, at least compared to Berlin or London.
Sounds good right?
Well... actually... not that great if you are ambitious, because it means that Austrian universities are over crowded. It is extremely common to see "long term" students, essentially people who study for 10+ years so they get state benefits as a student. Ambitious people will struggle to complete their studies in the minimum required time (e.g. 3 years for a Bachelor's), because overcrowding means that there are long waiting lists for exams. Some students need to enlist to a waiting list for an exam before even joining the university if they want to have a chance to do an exam in time so that they can finish within the 3 years. It's just complete bonkers.
Of course, because the EU is led by fucking geniuses (not), they thought it would be a good idea if any EU citizen is allowed to study in any EU country, meaning that Austrian universities are not only overcrowded, but overcrowded by Germans who don't want to pay tuition fees in their home country. It's easy for them because we speak the same language and Austrian students miss out on spaces and miss out on exam opportunities forcing them to study much longer than needed.
Honestly, it's a perfect example of how two populist headlines such as
- free tuition fees
- any EU citizen can study in any EU country
sound great on the news and abroad when you want to make your country/EU look good but in reality are a complete disaster.
I would have preferred to pay some fees which then would have meant that I could have had a normal university experience, but instead I didn't finish my degree at all because of those dumb socialist-populist policies which put me in the difficult situation of either aborting my studies and finding a job because my dad died, my mother was ill and I had to help out or study for an extra 2 years and struggle for the most basic things in life.
Also: raising tuition to prevent poor people from getting educated is not a cool way to prevent overcrowded universities. Proper financing and staffing is.
For example, my undergraduate Alma Mater, a New York State University, charges 7K per year in-state, 25K out-of-state. Which one of those is factored into the average cited here?
Furthermore, what percentage of students actually pay this tuition? Poor students get financial aid from the government and the university, good students get academic scholarships - all the way up to a free ride. Are those discounts reflected in the averages?
And, direct tuition is not the full story of the cost of education. For example, while it looks like a NY student can get a good deal on State education, it's possible that their family's life-time tax bill to support education far exceeds the savings. Likewise, if German tuition seems cheap - where is the money coming from? Germans must be paying for it in some other way.
The thing that matters the most is: how affordable is a college education to someone. Let's say I am a New York resident with good grades and I can get a half-ride tuition (3.5K/year) at a very good State School, the fact that I could also go to NYU (50k/year) or Columbia (61k/year) is irrelevant to my affordability. If I chose to go in to 240K debt to go to Columbia, that's my choice and my problem I could have gone to Stony Brook and pay 14K for 4 years for a solid education.
And finally, there's the elephant in the room that not all degrees are the same, but somehow they cost the same. If I get a highly relevant degree (let's say, Engineering) then even the 240K student debt can be easily paid off in a few years of full time work, and launch me into a great career (though, the Stony Brook degree would too.) On the other hand, the fact that Columbia would likewise happily bill you 240K for a soft-degree that will never lead to a good job is a fricking crime.
Tax-financed, obviously.
A big difference here is that non-university career paths seem far better accepted than in the USA.
Obviously (as in my New York example.) I am just making the point that this stuff costs people whether it shows up in the article or not.
> A big difference here is that non-university career paths seem far better accepted than in the USA.
I actually think this is one of those things where following "what's acceptable" is going to hurt people, as it often does. For example, there's plumber in my town, one of the things he does is helps people drain their sprinkler systems for the winter. $70 a pop for 20 mins of work, so $210 an hour. I would be very surprised if he has a degree.
Meanwhile, someone can have a $240K degree from Columbia in something totally useless and be working in retail for minimum wage. To some degree this person is "more acceptable" because he went to college, but in a real sense this person is powerless, not just despite their degree but in part because of it. That's not a sustainable situation and I can't see this kind of thing continue.
As a side not, it's funny that we sometimes make fun of politicians that have support among non-college educated adults. But in my mind, I am much more impressed with someone that my plumber thinks is good, vs the 240k-in-debt Columbia grad.