There are student loans in virtually every country, including Europe, and I'd say they're quite commonly used. The difference is whether they're required to pay for tuition or not. For example, in Norway public universities (which are most, including the best ones) are tuition-free.

In countries like the Netherlands, there is tuition, but heavily subsidised. Fees are about 2k per year, and low (and partially to middle-income) households get a government stipend that is more than double that fee per year.

In short, people in these countries have to pay living expenses, tuition is pretty much covered. And a lot of these countries are quite small and have people living near the university, with decent public transportation, which is often free for students as well. As such lots of students live at home instead of on-campus, moving out for lifestyle reasons as soon as they can (often taking out loans to supplement a parttime job), rather than for the logistics of having to move to a place near the university.

In the US there's a lot of subsidies, state programs, scholarships etc as well. But many people still end up paying way more, especially if they're going out of state. And there's lots of people who end up having to move city to study somewhere, which means paying for room and board are very much a requisite part of their studies.

As such the loan amounts are nowhere near as large. Second, loans tend to be government issued, the cost-of-capital essentially tracking the interest on state bonds (e.g. treasury bills in the US) with a cap of 0%. This means in the Netherlands for example interest rates for student loans have been 0% for years and will likely remain at 0% for many years. This presents a wildly different outlook for students because borrowing $30k today isn't going to turn into having to pay back $100k over the course of the loan the coming decades, but just $30k, which is depreciating due to inflation in real terms over time.

There is literally no tuition in Sweden. The loans are for rent and general cost of living. You can have literally zero means and still go to university in another city.

What's more, the interest rate is practically free and you can take 25 years to pay them off if you want. Students are not seen as desperate marks to be exploited.

There is no such thing as 'no tuition'. In Sweden's case, the public is paying the tuition

When you say literally, what do you mean? Almost or absolutely? Because I get confused, since, literally, literally doesn't mean literally with some people, literally.

Do you encounter similar confusion with ‘really’, ‘very’, and ‘truly’?

False. It's subsidized to zero for citizens, but many schools are not free for foreigners either from EU or outside of it. Same in most EU countries.

Yes, so for EU citizens, there is no/low tuition in the EU, making the statement true.

This works this way for most social programs in most countries. E.g. to can't migrate to a country and then claim unemployment benefits. That doesn't mean the statement "the country has an unemployment program" is false.

Unemployement is something different, you can't compare apples to oranges. Nobody is paying for getting unemployment, you're not eligible at worst.

There are dozens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people paying for universities in the European countries with public schools (most of paying students are of second/third-world background in a country that is acting passively aggressively to them because of their non-resident/non-citizen status [that causes issues e. g. with banking services], btw), and many of them in Sweden, that's why I feel the statement is false. Also note that I'm not judging, merely stating a fact; I don't see anything wrong with both funding approaches, and think they should be combined (like in Czechia).

And the UK. Although it's not a normal loan in that repayments are linked to income and there is a promise that it will be "forgiven" at retirement (which I'm a little skeptical of)

Not even retirement, 30 years after graduating. I do wonder how the government managed to sell so many of those loans on when I expect a small minority will ever end up getting fully repaid, given the high-ish interest and earning threshold for starting repayment.

The UK loans are actually a good deal if you really understand them, which students here inevitably don’t. It makes demanding government to pay for tuition here pretty abhorrent imho.

I know a lot of working class/blue-collar families here, and talking with them, it really becomes clear how incredibly selfish and unreasonable it is to expect their taxes to buy someone wealthier than them an education that they themselves are denied by virtue of being raised in harsher circumstances.

I'm entirely incapable of understanding how a UK SLC "loan" can be considered a loan in the conventional sense of the word when it seems to have literally no characteristics of a loan, and every characteristic of a tax:

* You only pay it when you are in employment and earning money (with a minimum salary for repayments to be taken);

* The repayments are calculated as a function of your taxable income;

* The balance isn't discharged by bankruptcy;

* The balance isn't considered by lenders when assessing your suitability to take on "real" debt.

As far as I can tell, it's a graduate tax (on those who took a loan) for all intents and purposes.

I see comments from students talking about being "crushed by debt" as a result of taking an SLC loan, and I just can't work out where this perception comes from: yes, it decreases your take-home pay, but since there's a minimum salary threshold for payments to be taken, it's never going to leave you destitute.

I think that the modern loans are a far less amicable deal than I had just a few years ago. Interest rates far higher despite an incredibly low rate environment.

But. The repayment thresholds and the loan forgiveness period do massively reduce the onerousness, especially on those in lower paid roles who would otherwise never repay. My main complaint about the system is really how it drags on the middle.

The successful graduates pay off their loans in 6-7 years, or less. If you're earning 40-50k, you'll take more like 20 years to pay off the loan which feels like a long hard slog. I still think graduate tax would have been the right call.

6-7 years on standard repayments would require a salary of around £100k straight out of uni.

On £40k you'd end up with them cancelled and likely repay less than you borrowed (45k typical borrowing, £38k repaid over 30 years).

1. The amount that you "borrowed" is a fake number, though, with no correspondence to the true cost of the course and is non-existant for e.g. Scottish students in Scotland.

2. Your salary will (is expected to) inflate; the repayment threshold currently does not, so the "time value of money" has something to say about how much you repay. Someone whose salary remains constant on the equivalent of £40k will find their repayments an increasing burden.

The repayment threshold is expected to rise with average earnings so someone on an equivalent salary of £40k would be expected to pay back less in real terms than that calculation if wages rise above inflation.

The amount you borrow is not a fake number, whether it is related to the course cost or not, just as the price of a car is not a fake number even if it was cheaper to produce. It also includes literal cash payments to you.

What £ of tax would the working class family contribute towards university education (assuming you accept this paradigm of tax and spend)? Back of envelope calculation suggests income tax collected from a median family would be £50 per year.

Meanwhile, I know plenty of working class/blue-collar families who believe that debt is an unmanageable risk that they should reject if at all possible.

Their children take that to mean that they absolutely shouldn't go to university, no matter how capable they are.

> Back of envelope calculation suggests income tax collected from a median family would be £50 per year.

Back of envelope calculation is definitely wrong.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I'm just saying that £50 figure is definitely not right, without doing any calculation. (OK sure - 50/0.2 = £250 taxed at basic rate above personal allowance. Which this year I think is £12k5, and median household income is surely above £12k75.)

Ah apologies, I was answering my own question: I meant marginal tax required to pay for university level education in place of current student loans system.

this, but also that:

“ What £ of tax would the working class family contribute towards university education”

Is not really fair to the issue. It’s not a cost for university education, because it’s not open to all - there are gatekeepers - and those from underprivileged backgrounds have very little chance of being accepted to the most prestigious institutions, so it’s unfair to expect them to pay for it, is essentially my point.

My point is that people from underprivileged backgrounds realistically don't pay any different amount in tax and are only further removed from access.

To repeat myself: "Their children take [accruing debt] to mean that they absolutely shouldn't go to university, no matter how capable they are."

Tax pays for plenty of things that working class people don't use; it also pays for plenty of things that working class people do use, that other people are paying for - and the latter category should include university education. Tax is an agreement that we find these things valuable to pay for, as a society. Not everything paid for in taxes has a direct benefit to everybody.

"Tax is an agreement that we find these things valuable to pay for, as a society."

But we don't agree. A lot of people are affronted that as they see it they're being asked to, in essence, fund a high quality education for wealthier people's kids that their own kids can never have access to.

Whether they're right or wrong (and I've yet to see evidence that they're wrong), that's their view. And there are a lot of them. Which is why Clegg could never sell it to the electorate back in the coalition days.

If we all took the point of view that any government spending that doesn't directly and immediately benefit us personally should be cancelled, no government spending would be likely to happen at all. It's an inherently right-wing/individualist position.

I think this is an issue of right-wing media spin, rather than beliefs that working-class families innately hold. (Also since my experience of working-class families' views is generally the opposite of your claim.)

There is a lot more egregious government spending distribution problems than this one, which get ignored. In general, government spending benefits the middle classes (and upper classes) far more than it does the working class, and that's true in other areas more than it is in education.

From https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/does-uk-government-sp... e.g. "The wealthy also drive three times as many miles as the poor. This makes them big beneficiaries of spending on roads, worth £8 billion a year. Poor people make up ground elsewhere: they use buses twice as much. But bus subsidies are smaller."

-But those loans do not cover tuition (which is basically free), but your living expenses while studying, which you would have incurred anyway.

And here (Sweden, Norway) the student loan is used for living costs: rent, food, books, and nothing goes to the university.

...meaning they end up pretty small: my debt was about 250 000 SEK -- very roughly $25k -- after 5 years of university. Combined with the monthly stipend that everyone gets, I was "self-supporting"; my parents didn't have to (and wouldn't have been able to) pay any money out of pocket for my education or living expenses during that time. And now I pay around $1k total on that loan every year. I could pay it off faster, but the terms are so good that I'd rather use it to lower my mortgage, or invest it.

Thanks to this system, I got the opportunity to do what I wanted, and society gets another well-paid software engineer that can pay lots of taxes. Win-win!

(Edit: corrected debt from 300 000 SEK to 250 000 after checking)