1. Efficiency. Canadian universities deliver similar/better products at much lower cost. Not just cost at point of use, but actual "amount of money spend annually to deliver education".
2. Financing model. Taxation allows you to fund things without paying interest to a middle man. If you pay off a set of loans whose principle is 50K, but with 5%-7% interest rates, then you're paying a lot more than 50K. So even if the products were equal in price, the taxation model might work out ahead.
2. I haven't looked at the data, but I'm going to go out on a VERY short branch here and assert that the entire delta between US and CA tax rates is not consumed by higher education.
Right, I figured. This is entirely orthogonal to the discussion about the problems with higher ed in the us...
Yes taxation is higher, but I still feel like we get a lot more bang for our bucks here.
> 85% of graduates have less than $50,000 in student loans. Paid off over 20 years, that’s really not much.
It is pretty terrifying that you manage to mentally justify going in debt for 20 years over your college education. I understand that given a good job it's easy to pay it back, but I never even borrowed even a tenth of that to complete my engineering degree and I've probably paid my education back several time in taxes to the government.