Maybe not completely free (to deter people from sticking around for 10+ years), but at least semi free. Probably below 1k a year. If you add living costs to tha

Maybe not completely free (to deter people from sticking around for 10+ years), but at least semi free. Probably below 1k a year. If you add living costs to that, anyone who takes up a part time student job should be able to sustain themselves and graduate without debt. Any system that forces someone to graduate with significant amounts of student debt, is in my view, bad. It's not really going to benefit society, unless your view of society is modern slavery and chaining people as a slave to their debts. Mind: that doesn't mean that certain schools aren't worth the tuition (Stanford, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, etc). But part of the "value offering" comes from the network you build up there. That all said, while university can be a good part of your development as an adult, maybe more people will eventually realise it's not necessarily the best option anymore. The writer of this article might have gotten a similar "education" (perhaps not in the formal sense -- but on an intellectual level) had she gone and lived abroad in a new environment doing something useful for a few years when she was in her late teens / early 20s. But it's a very personal situation that very much depends on the individual.