In my country (Finland), government actually pays for studying and universities are free. My experience studying abroad is that actually the curriculum and studying is mostly the same all over the world. I think there might some outliers in the TOP10 universities in the world, but the major differences are in the student population, connections and reputation. I think only maybe 10-20% study really hard anyways. At that point in life most people would have more than 100 usable hours easily, but most of the students do minimal work necessary and do something else.

What's the point of this comment? It's off topic at best and an excuse to debate about European vs US colleges at worst.

I only attended one university but it was quite a lot more rigorous than anything I'd done up to that point in my life.

Look up international college rankings. The US is vastly overrepresented in terms of quality of higher education.