Education, like most things in the US, is supported by debt. Tuition for a single semester at Georgia Tech, for an out of state student like myself, would run $14,861: http://www.bursar.gatech.edu/student/tuition/Spring_2014/Spr...

Also the debt cannot be gotten rid of by declaring yourself bankrupt. It is a 'federal' debt.

Think the UK has sort of got this right. Your tuition fees are a debt (at very low interest rates) that you never have to pay off unless you start earning significant amounts of money. It's repaid as a percentage of your salary above a certain income level.

Hmm, "right" is a pretty contentious point here still given the still recent betrayal of the Lib Dems.

And 20 years ago it used to be completely free and you'd even be given money to go in the form of grants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_in_the_United_King...

Not sure a political party can be relied on to do the right thing. It's the nature of politics.

20 years ago I could buy a house for a decent price. I started Uni in 1990 and that was the first year student loans were introduced. So you'd have to have graduated in 1989 (25 years ago) to not have been impacted by student loans.

What has changed is that the cost of going to University has now been transferred correctly to the student. I see nothing wrong in somebody choosing to go to University and I know many people of my era that just went to University because that is what you did. Now people try and evaluate if going to University is the correct career choice.

The important thing to remember is that this 'debt' is not an issue. You have to be financially 'successful' to even start to need to pay it off and the interest rate is currently at 1.5% (Commercial rates are around 6-9%) and is written off after 25 years, unlike the US student debt which is at commercial rates and you cannot escape.

I definitely don't agree with "Correctly"?

It's a social investment in the future of the country, there's nothing objectively correct that at some arbitrary point in your education you suddenly need to pay. I wonder when you want to start having school children accrue their loans for primary/secondary school?

Why is part of your education free and part of it not? And perhaps the most important part that you arguably desperately need if you want to access a middle class job?

Isn't that massively elitist and a class discriminator? That when you do finally get that job you have to pay a load of money back that your richer peers just put in a saving account and earned some free money?

And if that's what's changed why do so many more people go to university now than previously?

Everything you've just said makes absolutely no sense from a different perspective.

The world is unfair and some people are born into money and many many more are not. The government has taken the decision to provide free education up to a specific level. Should you wish to pursue a degree, the government provides a debt mechanism to do this.

The debt is non-repayable until you have pretty much become financially successful and is written off after 25 years. I really don't see this as a major issue. There is nothing financially stopping you going to University.

I'd actually argue that the government debt should also cover residential accommodation and minimum living costs.

It isn't really "completely free" if it's coming out of tax revenue, is it? Paid for by taxation would be the correct way to describe that situation, it seems.

For anyone skimming over this post, $14,861/semester adds up to $118,888 over four years.

And that doesn't include a place to live or food to eat. The hidden costs can be quite substantial as well.

Or books either. Probably $1,000 in books per year. Maybe more.

This kind of sky high prices necessarily deprives a large number of intelligent and brilliant people from ever getting a college education in USA. This directly has an impact on the economy in the long run. Instead of funding an expensive military, US fed govt should just pay for every ones college education and recover it over the entire working life of the person in small bits. Better to have high national debt in return for an extremely well educated population instead of a white elephant of a military.

Supply and demand. The demand is extremely high, with every high school graduate being pressured to "go to college!" (to what end, few know) and student loans being so easy to get. The supply is limited, as a nation can only produce so many professors and places for them to teach.

Your suggestion "US fed govt should just pay for every ones college education" (however paid for) would just increase the demand even more. You'd still be depriving a large number of intelligent and brilliant people from ever getting a college education in USA by the sheer mass of bodies signing up - and you'd still have a limited supply of teachers & facilities, so odds of the "deserving" getting what they need remains low.

Demand outstripping supply, prices naturally rise until equilibrium. Making payment easier thru cheap debt or government handouts doesn't solve the problem because that increases the demand without improving supply. MOOCs, by improving the teacher/student ratio by orders of magnitude, does work toward solving the problem (and decreases costs as well!).

Would it really take four years to do a masters? I thought most masters degrees were one- or two-year programs.

Don't you need a bachelor's degree to begin a masters? So it'd be up to 6 years.

Everything that is near-socialized in other western industrialized countries is paradoxically more expensive here. 3 Years of law school is $150k, not counting actual cost of living. Schools run in the realm of $14k to $50k a year in tuition costs alone.

Out of interest, why can't you do law (or indeed medicine) as a first degree in the US?

On a mechanical level, a 4 year degree is an entrance requirement at med/law schools.

On a more practical level, the schools that are good enough to land you a job as a doctor/lawyer are all so competitive that a hole in your CV like not having a bachelor's degree when everyone else has one is a real disadvantage.

On the practical point, I suppose that's true. There are a few US universities that offer slightly shortened paths to getting a medical or law degree for students entering as undergraduates. I seem to recall that CUNY (City University of New York) offered a six-year B.S./M.D. program, and Columbia offered a six-year bachelor's/JD program, and maybe they still do, but of course you get a bachelor's degree during the course of such programs.

"a 4 year degree is an entrance requirement at med/law schools"

Yes, I know that - but why have this requirement - as far as I know most other countries don't (certainly the UK doesn't).

The requirement that one have a bachelor's degree prior to entering a first-degree law program gradually took hold, mainly during the earlier part of the 20th century I believe. One reason was to make it harder for people (particularly people from immigrant communities) to enter the legal profession. Another reason was to increase the prestige of the legal profession by turning it into a graduate degree program. This latter reason is also behind two later developments (making it standard for the law degree program to be 3 years, and rebranding the name of the degree from the traditional LLB (Bachelor of Laws) to the pretentious JD (Juris Doctor). The 3-year standardization was not fully in place until the mid-20th century, IINM, and the LLB->JD rebranding largely took place during the early post-WW2 era. The JD rebranding no doubt had something to do with the high prestige enjoyed by the medical profession by the mid-20th century.

As for why the bachelor's degree is required for medical schools, I don't know as much about that (I'm a lawyer and have studied the history of the US legal profession a bit). I suspect some of the reasons are the same (other than competition with the other profession, since I think the medical profession was the earlier mover here).

Edit: postwar -> post-WW2 as I realize most HN readers may not have grown up with that long-default US usage of "postwar".

Thanks - my wife is a solicitor in Scotland (and has been called to the Bar as an Advocate) and she did her LLB as a second degree as she already had a first degree. Although her route was unintentional it certainly used to be "traditional" to do law as second degree (and some universities here do an accelerated 2 year ordinary LLB) after a degree in classics or similar. She trained in the Civil Service as a solicitor (when you get a law degree you are still 3 years away from actually qualifying - you have to do a postgraduate course then do two years training in a a law firm) and their filtering criteria for trainees was that they have 2 first degrees....

Only a very small number of people do law as a second degree these days.

Amusingly, the process for training as an advocate is known as devilling - where you are apprenticed to a senior junior and during that time you are literally an advocate's devil :-)

I should add that we're starting to see some reverse movement in the US legal profession on this stuff, glacially speaking. The 3-year requirement for American Bar Association-accredited law schools has come increasingly into question during the past few years, partly a result of the current perceived crisis of historically high unemployment and lack of practical skills among (typically heavily-in-debt) law school graduates. A reduction from 3 to 2 years is foreseeable. In which case it may become marginally tougher to maintain that the degree should have the word 'Doctor' in it.

Edit: Another thing we're starting to hear in conjunction with calls to reduce the 3-year program is to institutionalize something like the 'devilling' that you speak of, i.e. to replace the third academic year with an apprenticeship year.

> Since when is a 375 person class massive

That isn't all -- none of the classes actually have 375 students. There are several classes being offered per semester, and most students are doing only one or two. I can't find the figure at the moment, but iirc class sizes are ~150.

I am curious whether the tuition fee is same on international (non-EU) students or non-research courses.