I live in the US and was able to go to college almost for free. There were a few caveats though:

1. I waited until I was 24. This meant that my parents income did not affect my federal assistance so that I could get the maximum amount.

2. I went to a dirt cheap community college my first two years. It was so cheap that the federal grants covered my tuition, books, plus a little extra for living expenses.

3. I did really well at community college and was able to get a few scholarships at a bigger university.

4. In my state there is a block transfer program so that all of my credits at community college counted at the larger university.

5. I was able to live at home for the entire duration so I did not have to pay a huge sum for campus housing.

I was able to get a computer science degree from a state university with somewhere around $1000 in debt which I paid off entirely with my first paycheck.

I was only in $1000 in debt because I foolishly bought a $2400 gaming laptop.

> I was able to live at home for the entire duration so I did not have to pay a huge sum for campus housing.

While this might make financial sense at first, living in the dorms was one of (if not THE) best social experiences of my life, and in my opinion, worth the cost. I still have numerous friends and acquaintances I made via the dorms, going on 20 years later. In a few cases they have paid off socially and business-wise.

I would not recommend cutting out the singular "dorm experience" for the sake of saving a few bucks you can make back later anyway.

By contrast, I did not live in the dorms when I went to college and I feel like I missed out on a lot. There's no one from my college years that I keep in touch with.

Same here - I went to a commuter school (still a big state school though, just a non-traditional environment) with a fairly high average student age and only lived on campus a single year. That single year was better than the other three combined. I was dumb and immature and didn't realize the value of friends at the time, and now am not friends with anyone from college.

Isn't there a conflict between points 1 and 5? Claiming to be an independent student while living at home?

You can't be claimed as a dependent at age 24.

> To meet the qualifying child test, your child must be younger than you and as of the end of the calendar year, either be younger than 19 years old or be a student and younger than 24 years old. There is no age limit on claiming your child as a dependent if the child meets the qualifying relative test.

http://www.irs.gov/Help-&-Resources/Tools-&-FAQs/FAQs-for-In...

It's a technicality. Once you age out you're "not a dependent" for the purposes of educational subsidies/loans.

Getting married has a similar effect, or at least it used to. You could get married, live with one or the other's well-off parents or otherwise be supported by them, but go to school for free or nearly so. Obviously, that's not for everyone :-)

The maximum grant you'll get from the government is about 6k. Anything beyond that is typically the school giving a scholarship or a third party scholarship. And schools typically use a different formula for need aid that doesn't presume you are independent at age 24.

A sensible system would be one like Brazil's (and possibly other countries): free education at public universities for those who qualify on the stringent entrance exams along with a system of private universities for those who don't make it and can pay for it.

This would allow all deserving students a high quality, free education while limiting the amount of waste and degree inflation that would result from a completely free university system.

With the caveat that public elementary education in Brazil is very bad, so the people who are able to qualify on those exams are the people who come from families who could afford private schools at the elementary level.

So in essence, it's a system that's geared towards keeping the rich educated and the poor uneducated, by using a slight Catch-22.

Of course YMMV, and it often does, Brazil is huge and there are exceptions, but what I've laid out is what most commonly happens.

In the past few years though, the Government has built programs whose goal is to increase the amount of poor people who get educated, either by subsidizing the cost with tax money in private universities (Gasp! Socialism! :P) or by affirmative action with a quota system in public universities.

This brings about worries of its own, such as "Will people who are granted access to well-ranked Universities based primarily on their low income be able to actually follow through with the course?", for example, but overall the situation is an improvement.

The USA's education system of student debt is also addressing another important problem - quality leakage to a foreign country. Think about it, Brazil (or any other country with a similar system) invests heavily in training its bright people for free, and afterwards it just looses them to some high bid foreign employer and the country's education investment gets counted as waste. USA on the other hand, puts the yoke on its promising younglings early on, so regardless of the outcome, the country gets a profit out of them (and in a capitalist frame of thought that's what does mater the most). Clever, isn't it?

> A sensible system would be one like Brazil's (and possibly other countries): free education at public universities for those who qualify on the stringent entrance exams along with a system of private universities for those who don't make it and can pay for it.

California used to have a multitier system of tuition-free higher-education (two tiers of tuition-free public university, both selective but one moreso than the other, plus the community college system) along with private universities, so it worked somewhat like that, but that eroded over time.

The political culture in the United States would attack that system as being unfair to the poor and minorities that ostensibly received a lesser education than their middle- and upper-class cohorts.

When something like that existed in California, that wasn't the thing that destroyed it, rather, it was funding pressure from anti-tax crusaders.

The kind of people who advocate for fairness for the poor and minorities are more likely to advocate for moves back toward that system rather than away from it.

To pay for someone's education someone else must be taxed. Why is it better to tax a working person for every student's education instead of just having that person pay for the exact education they received?

People with university education tend to have higher incomes and in countries with sane laws therefore pay more in taxes. On average they will pay more than they get from government.

Apart from that I feel much more comfortable going to a doctor, knowing that she has gained that position by skill and not because her parents could afford it.

Some graduates go on to pay more tax, others don't. The question is do we want our doctors/bankers be taxed more to pay for the education of our sport scientists/elementary school teachers?

Because we all benefit by living in a well-educated society. It's the same argument with public schools at lower levels. Would you advocate that these also be made exclusively private?

To pay for infrastructure repairs someone else must be taxed. Why is it better to tax a working person in order to repair roads instead of just having drivers pay for the proportion of roads that they use?

I don't see the problem with this?

From a moral point of view, this is actually how it should be done. But the thing is, for one it is easier to get money from someone who has it than from someone who has not. Then there is also a nasty political debate hidden in there, about how you as a community should take care of each other in order to prosper. That poor driver may really depend on that road paid by others to make a living on his own, and you as a government will gladly bend the rules a little bit off from what's equitable for everyone, otherwise those poor bastards (becoming jobless and having too much time on their hands) will make unpleasant noise, unlike the quiet (wealthy and mostly happy) payers. After all, you wish to keep your political seat AND appear as a good caretaker which governs for the people, right? And finally, the reality is not always in harmony with our sense of justice, and if the you're not going to pay for infrastructure of remote areas that have poor economical prospective (...or corruption, or what not), the infrastructure in those areas will most likely collapse, for not having enough means of self-sustenance. The country is like an organism that should take care of its organs to prevent falling apart, no mater what.

Okay, you contact a construction crew (and other associated contractors, civil engineers, etc), and you make sure they're doing their job. And if they don't, you take on the liability for any damages done by potholes, broken guard rails on bridges, etc.

Does that still sound good to you?

Because taxing is low on low incomes while high on high incomes. And that you do not know before starting to work which king of income, if any, you will have. that's the big equity advantage of redistribution.

Nonsense. Those who invest a lot into education (and yes, I would say this requires having a lot to invest---but people unwisely taking out student loans in the US prove that this isn't necessary) in an appropriate field will typically have higher incomes. So by taxing them more too, society is double-dipping.

Agreed, where does our tax money go? It seems that other nations despite their level or method of taxation are able to provide for free to subsidized secondary education to their citizens.

Good question. My random guess would be that it goes into wars. Defense represents about 17% of the federal tax money. I don't know how it compares with other countries though, and whether or not it's a money leak or profitable in the long run.

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

You spend the highest percentage of your budget on the military. That's where it goes.

That's not true at all [1].

This holds for previous years as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...

"You spend the highest percentage of your budget on the military." This is true. The US spends more on its military than any other country, and the greatest percentage of GDP on its military.

I think your interpretation was that I meant that the biggest percentage of the budget is spent on the military as compared to other government departments or military, which is not what I was trying to say.