Why does free college work in Denmark but will fail if implemented in America?
The reason why student debt is basically unheard of in Denmark since college is free (although to make that happen, the Danish government poses high taxation towards citizens like they do in order to maintain stable social security nets like subsidised healthcare and public housing, also why they have less homelessness).
Mainly Danish, Swiss and European citizens are eligible to study without stressing over student debt upon graduation. It stems from this: Danish government is more on for the people while American government is more on caring about themselves plus nepotism on the side (MORE & HIGHER TAXES TOO ON TOP OF THAT).
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If we didn't have a military we could do it. The world would still bitch at us for not policing the world. Either way we're bitched at, so who cares.
A ton of reasons. Among them: capitalist/military extremism. Private sector profits and """defense""" are treated as holy, so the profits of the education sector and of weapons manufacturers need to be protected. The completely out of control military expenditure is one large reason why Americans can't have many nice things that other countries have (education, healthcare, etc.) as it sucks so much of the national budget.
It requires two things America doesn't want to do.
Taxing the rich and nationalizing an industry.
America tried to make college free by guaranteeing free grant money for college. The colleges then suddenly needed to up the tuition fees setting us back to square one.
Step 1: Give everyone a free dollar to add to their lunch budget. Step 2: Lunch starts to cost $1 more.
"needed"
I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
Lyndon B. Johnson
False premise.
What makes you think it would fail? In all likelihood, it would probably be very successful if properly supported.
We all know it won’t be properly supported, it will get abused
It would absolutely work.
Forcing people into crippling debt, however, helps create the indentured servitude class. The in debt students and future workers are less likely to waste time on stupid things like protesting or revolt.
Educational debt is one of the prongs of system rigging and the elites in America prefer it this way.
Elite owned media keeps pumping out the bs of affordability and scaring people with trans nonsense and the cycle keeps on going.
If Americans could wake the f up it could change quickly, but history has shown that they won’t.
It also helps push people away from furthering their education. If its just another bill to pay, why bother when you can get just as good a job without it?
It won’t fail if implemented in the US. The US is convinced that bettering its people is libtard stupidity.
There's also the matter of how every institution here exists to extract wealth profitably. It's not just libtarded to invest in citizens at a less than explosive profit return, it also undermines the system of exploitation that needs people dumb and cheap to hire.
It starts feeling like the government thinks education is dangerous and only gets in the way of the ruling class.
It worked in the US for many years...quietly. Ask Boomers, Gen-X, and probably Millenials how much their University of Puerto Rico education cost them, and you'll mostly get a big fat $0. For a long time, UPR price per credit was closely tied to federal Pell grants. The grant check, which applied a vast majority of students, would cover credits and books most of the time.
Yeah that is what I said..
I was agreeing with you and providing a US based example.
Works in Germany as well (with a very low fee, nearly free).
We believe that education is a basic human right. The human rights are equal for all humans (listen, Usamericans: humans, not just "citizens"), therefore it must not happen that low income can hinder it. And that's also the reason why German universities regularly accept a good number of students from all over the world.
Why it "works"? Well it's simply the government's job to make it work. We, the people pay them for doing their job. As you might know, or not, in a democracy the people are the highest authority.
For full transparency, Germany does have tuition fees for non-EU students. Though at 650-1050€ per semester, they are still lower than most US tuition fees. The reasoning is basically that universities are financed with taxes and if you are likely to never pay German income tax, you have to make up for that. In an ideal world we wouldn't need that and I don't really like it but I can somewhat understand that the state wants to prevent people from coming over for free education and then immediately leaving.
Ha, there’s that understated German language. That price is a tiny fraction of US tuition.
More like the careful phrasing of someone who didn't want someone to jump out of the bushes with "Well aaaaactually, if you live in my state, go to a university three states over, are born on February 29th and promise to give the dean a blowjob every Friday, you only pay 1200 USD which, by today's exchange rate is a few cents lower than your upper bound."
As predicted, you have a sibling comment doing exactly that.
Sometimes I think the internet was a mistake.
the real cost of college for most students is closer to $10K a year.
did you even go to college? or are you just ragebaiting yourself over sticker prices?
So you agree that the 650 to 1050€ figure in my post is lower than your $10K? Yes? Good.
I have a BSc and MSc in computer science from one of the top universities in Germany. I paid about 4000€ in total because I was unlucky to have my first few semesters fall into the time that had the 500€ per semester tuition. Someone who started a bit after me would come out under 2000€. Again, not per year but in total for two degrees.
if you wanted scholarship you should have studied harder man.
or maybe been better at sucking the dean's cock.
Only 17% of students who attend college pay sticker price. The vast vast majority are receiving substantial aid to lower those prices.
but hey, don't let the facts of reality get in the way of your hyperbolic doomer narrative, where you are forced to suck cock.
Sure, and most people don’t pay “full price” at the hospital. Yet health insurance is insanely expensive in itself. So yes almost everybody gets some sort of discount, but it’s usually a drop in the bucket. $1000 “scholarships” might be a 1% discount.
you're just spouting lies and bullshit.
these are all numbers we can look up, and the statistics aren't as bleak wish they were.
but again don't let reality get in the way of your hyperbolic bitterness towards the world, I guess.
a minority of people get fucked by the healthcare and education systems, and often it's to some degree their own fault or ignorance. the median medical debt is $2,000. just because a minority of people it's like 200,000, doesn't mean that is a general condition for the vast majority of people.
But hey, who am I to get in the way of your ignorant rage?
Yes, we actually don't know the numbers that are common over there, but I have heard that students get in debt for a huge part of their lifetime - which we consider a scandal and a shame for a country.
The numbers are on google dude.
The average student debt is 30K. Most students pay about 10K a year for college here, because most students get a lot of financial aid. that isn't a lifetime of debt. nor is it crippling. that student goes off and typically gets a 50-70K job, and pays off the debt in 5-10 years. But the media isn't going to report that.
They are going to report the kid that has 300K in debt, and a degree in English, and can't get a job outside of Starbucks, because that is DRAMATIC. Those people do exist, but they are a STARK minority, and frankly, having personally known some of those people, they are really really dumb and they make bad choices, even when better choices are available to them. Usually out of being stubborn single-minded asses. They usually get there from a series of bad choices, and they cry 'innocent'.
I've also known people with modest debts, who didn't pay them back because they want to party and 'live it up', and yeah 10 years later they are massive. Well... that's how debt works. You need to pay it back. I am in my 40s and I meet regularly meet people who have never paid a dime back on their student loans after 20 years, who how have six figures of student debt.
A lot of Americans are very very bad with money. They buy things they can't afford, and get angry at everyone else about their debts.
plenty of kids in america get cheap uni fees. You just don't hear about them because that's not dramatic.
The college I went to now charges a 100K sticker price, but when I went it was 30K, but I only paid about 5-6K a year. Had I gone today it would have been entire free. For my graduate degree I went to Canada because they offered me 20K a year to attend.
Many of my friends got free educations in the USA, often because they went to less prestigious schools and those schools were willing to pay them to go there. My nephew just got into college, and several of his friends did this, so they are going to school for free, rather than go 200K into debt to go to a fancier school.
The people who get shafted the most are kids from higher income families, who are not academically gifted or who can't get a sports scholarship. if your family is making 150K+ a year and you're a B student, yeah you're going to pay full freight. But truth is your parents can probably afford it, even if it means they have to skip vacations for a few years.
Americans are selfish assholes, it is just a fact. I have lived here almost 50 years and that's all there is to it
Why is American culture so selfish, though? Humans are just animals and are easily influenced. "Culture" is a continuously moving target. What are the sources that have had the most influence on Americas population over the last 20-80 years?
As a foreigner who was heavily influenced by American culture up until getting cable news in my room and watching fox news as a teenager in 2001, the year I was studying modern history and its propaganda, I would argue the root cause is Americas business and political leadership. Millions of people have expected mask-off fascism from America far longer than Trump's been relevant. Why did those people come to that conclusion long ago?
Yeah I'm not saying it's all their fault either, and I am just as much of a product of that culture it's inescapable. I would agree with you there, but from the start we have always loved a story about someone coming from nothing, it's a story we have been telling ourselves over and over in this country, and while it happens it requires a great deal of support around you and that is never mentioned by anyone. It has gone way downhill since Reagan I would say, the 80s was just a supercharged consumerism culture here, which pits people against each other because when you have your neighbors competing against each other over who has the biggest house or boat or nicest car or whatever, they are spending spending spending. Lifestyles of the rich and famous, Cribs, celebrity worship, all that junk is to blame too
For any question about "why is this extra bad in the United States?", racism is probably a big factor. There's a book "Dying of Whiteness" that's pretty horrifying. Some people would literally rather suffer and die personally than let black people have nice things.
It's not the only factor, but it's a big one.
The other is rampant corruption, look at student loans right now, even federal. The amount of corruption, cruelty in the system is staggering.
Pick an issue in the US and it's probably because of xenophobia of some flavor (racism, bigotry, etc) or money. Often both.
For the epstein class it's only ever about money - they make up the racism/bigotry to get poor people to support their grift.
Not to say they aren't racist/bigoted, but to them, it's just a tool to get the money.
People are talking about taxes, but there is one part that is overlooked in how the decisions were being made.
College in the USA used to be much cheaper. The federal government gave state governments land to sell in order to fund "land grant colleges", basically the top of most states' public education system. There was massive funding into these colleges, which generally meant that private colleges needed to be somewhat competitive with poorer students. Government funding continued through the middle of the twentieth century with the GI Bill and a mix of federal and state aid to keep tuition low.
However, starting in the 1990's, three things started happening. First, millennials were getting ready to go to college in a wave that colleges had never seen, requiring the building of new facilities. Second, school rankings were becoming more important, so colleges started chasing clout and that chase cost money. Third, financial aid started to incorporate student loans as a way for kids to pay for college.
So, tuition costs soared as colleges were spending massive amounts of money on new buildings and ways to increase prestige while aid programs shifted to loans. In a lot of cases, states even pulled back funding as student loans could fill the void. Students still came as it was seen that a college education was required to have a good middle class life in the future.
Now that the millennial wave has crested, colleges are dealing with massively falling student numbers, which is a major problem given it became a significant revenue source.
this misses what happened to public colleges, like the land grant colleges you mention. at the height of counterculture, campuses exposed everyone to powerful ideas that made them do all kinds of organizing against the establishment. for example in 1970 the Ohio National Guard was called onto Kent State University and fired over sixty rounds into anti-war protestors, killing four. Ronald Reagan became California Governor, defunded universities, and introduced tuition to stop this onset of class consciousness; in his words, to bar “undesirables” from college. then in 1975, NYC went almost bankrupt, and regretfully adopted the same measures upon the City University system in a ton of cuts to tackle $14 billion and growing in debt. thus the same policies spread across the rest of the US. a similar reason is why the “leftist” party in Britain managed to landslide against 20 years of Conservative rule by promising to introduce tuition.
Yep, great comment.
And right now a lot of schools are shutting down because they can't enroll enough students and they charge way too much to attend. Like 12 schools in my state have closed in the past 2 years. These are typically cheaper schools too, but students don't want to go to cheap schools, so they don't apply.
Basically, it's a story of gluttony and greed.
The pricing dynamics of college education is also obscured. Basically, the reason they all charge so much is because they don't want to look 'cheap'. So if one place hikes tuition, they ALL have to do it, because they don't want to seem 'cheap' compared to a competitor. Nobody wants to go to the 'cheap' school.
There are great studies about how many colleges, when they increased their sticker prices, saw more students apply to go there. Because if you apply between a uni that charges 50K an one that charge 100K, the 100K one MUST be better. right? This means all the cheaper universities inflated their prices to look competitive with the more expensive ones.
BUT the real cost that students pay at both places is pretty much the same.
US is a classist society. They want to keep a large % of the population in poverty so that there's a large base of workers to exploit. The rich are more than willing to pay for their own kids' schools but not everyone's. Keep in mind that over 60% of the US has a bachelors degree- twice that of Denmark/Germany. The US has more wealth in general but still, that's a lot more schools than just the ones the rich kids go to. The reason we have so many more people going to college is that during deindustrialization, the workers were not protected. The government did nothing to help workers find new jobs or retrain. It was on the individual to figure out how to survive. People were told to go to college to attain a middle class lifestyle. Surprise, a classist society will keep you in the working class regardless of how educated you are.
you're wrong. only 35% of adults over 25 have a bachelors degree or higher.
50% is if you include 'some college' which means people who went but have no degree, or have an associates or other trade school/post-secondary level education.
no idea where you are getting 60% from, unless you're talking about certain states where most of the educated folks live.
American who moved to Denmark (though I haven't yet studied here at university, just language schools).
It would work in the US just fine, except that it wouldn't funnel money from 18 year old kids taking out loans to rich people's pockets.
My overall tax burden is only a little higher (3.5-4%) than it was in the US. And for that I get healthcare, university, significantly better working conditions and QoL all around, and a society I'm proud of instead of ashamed of.
Big recommend, though I don't consider the language easy
Does that also take into consideration not having to pay insurance premiums for basic healthcare?
I had a really sweet situation where I didn't pay for healthcare. With almost any other situation in the US I'm sure it would've been net cheaper here
The US used to have free state colleges, but only Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Public universities were in many cases free following WW2. But the generation made use of that, then pulled the ladders up in typical “I got mine. Fuck everybody else,” boomer fashion.
pretty much.
they basically didn't want to pay taxes, and all during the 70s and 80s they slashed tax rates and spent the money on cars and boats and travel.
Yup, and then it became "I was able to work a summer job and pay for my entire tuition, why are you whining you lazy young kid", ignoring the fact that you literally can't do that anymore.
I am ineligible for any federal or state grants. I'm an adult who lives alone, works full time, and pays all my own bills. I had to drop out of college because I couldn't afford the 20k a year tuition. The government told me that based off my income I should be able to afford to pay $39k worth of tuition and fees on my own, at the time I was making about $44k a year in total pay with OT. I guess I can just go live in a fucking box and eat out of the garbage while I finish my degree.
Meanwhile my old boss, who is married with a kid, dual income making a 6 figure salary and owns a really nice house, gets over 10k a semester in grants to attend 2 college classes a semester, because having a kid and owning a house means you can claim those expenses. I can't claim my rent as a living expense on the FASFA, therefore the government assumes I get free housing somehow.
Its a matter of culture and society
One problem seems to be that Americans treat education as a for-profit business. Universities must make money, text book publishers ask for horrendous amounts because they know the students have no other chance than to comply and there are probably many more places where money gets funneled away.
Many European countries on the other hand treat education as a service to society and an investment into everyone's future. We already have a shortage of well-educated professionals so we want to reduce the number of roadblocks that smart people have to overcome to reach their full potential.
In Germany, most universities have an administrative fee of about 100-200€ per semester that may pay for things like mandatory insurances, a students union and in the case of my old university, a psychological help service. For a couple of years, we had a 500€ per semester fee on top of that but it turned out that wasn't very popular. I think the first state to get rid of it was Baden-Württemberg when the Greens won the state election.
In america we have 1 administrator for every 2.5 students. And we have 1 faculty for every 30 students, and half the faculty are not full time.
It takes a lot of people to run the sports facilities, the healthcare clinics, the support services, the DEI offices, the grants admin, the labs and computer facilities, etc.
Education is not the point of our universities. What it is is making sure each student that attends is a very happy little camper. And that's exactly what our uni system has become, sleep away camp where you fill you days with fun activities, clubs, and sports, and you only spend about 10 hours a week doing anything educational.
Then we lament that our graduates lack basic job skills and can't read, do mathematics, or write...
Not to mention that most colleges have basically become real estate businesses with a school attached to them. In most college towns the college itself is the largest land owner. They are able to use small government to force sales and pick up real estate at small cost and later sell them for huge revenue. The rich schools aren't using their billion dollar endowments to benefit the school employees or students any more, they're using it to buy property.
It would not work because an educated populace is harder to control. Uneducated people will be easily manipulated to fight amongst themselves while the oligarchs do whatever they want
Who says it'd fail in the US? Oh right - people who are just politically opposed to the idea just because, and therefore invent reasons why it'd allegedly fail. Same as any other remotely decent thing that demonstrably works elsewhere.
An afterthought to this is that, while every country thinks it's special, the US thinks it's real special, and the exceptionalist mindset is probably not helping.
good luck getting universities and the american population to give up college sports, and all the other shit that american universities do taht don't exist in europe.
That would be an example of one of those invented reasons I was mentioning, yeah.
OK, go tell the ivy league universities to give up all their sports programs. see how that goes over.
because the rest of the usa education system follows what they do.
Damn, that's crazy.
universities are run by people dude.
monkey see, monkey do. everyone wants to follow bestest biggest monkey, and in the USA that's Harvard.
there are a handful of 'alt' schools that don't do this, but most of them are shutting down because they have no money.
It wouldn't?
It won't work in the US because those who profit from higher education successfully used their exorbitant fees to fund lobbyists and propagandists to convince Americans it's both normal and required.
We're far more oligarchy than democracy.
Moreover, the Danes give about $1000/month to students enrolled in university. Foreningers have a work requirement (not much) to ge the same benefit, too.
higher education in america is fundamentally culturally different.
like our entire culture is.
that's why.
Yet only 47% have a college degree. It's better than the US at 38% but then that figure is an average over the entire country. For example Poland in the EU is at 28% while DC in the US is at 65%.
I suspect that it's a difference in presentation. In the US college is free for anyone with high grades because of scholarships. In Denmark school is free for anyone with high grades. If you don't have high grades, you aren't allowed to go to college in Denmark.
EU schools separate kids out at an earlier age into Trade and College. Whereas the US sells the idea that everyone should try and go to college. So kids take on debt to go to college when they shouldn't have ever gone. If they had been in the EU, they would have never been presented with the idea of college- they would have been forced into trades like manufacturing and repair.
yep. people don't really want to acknowledge that in the german/danish systems, and often schools in asia, if you aren't a top student you aren't getting a higher education, it's completely barred from you.
and a lot of the same economic issues persist... most top students come from rich families... just like in the USA.
there is more opportunity for a poor kid to go to college for free/low cost in the USA. but they are a minority of students, and a lot of people HATE and resent them for that. especially the mediocre students from wealthy families.
It's the a major motivation for people to join the military.