Your conclusions are poorly supported by the evidence and reasoning you proffer. > 1. Anything that's free but is limited gets abused. Free does not mean unre

Your conclusions are poorly supported by the evidence and reasoning you proffer. > 1. Anything that's free but is limited gets abused. Free does not mean unrestricted. Degrees in law and medicine are highly sought in Denmark, and the universities raise the academic requirements for initial entry and continued study accordingly. > 2. I would love to see some study in this but it is my belief that reducing the cost of higher education increases the earning potential of college graduates. When I went to university (in Australia) it certainly seemed to be the case that the earning potential difference between graduates and non-graduates wasn't anywhere as near as the difference in the US Supposing there is a correlation, what is its relative significance? For example, Danish doctors are paid less than most of their US counterparts. But that is due to uniform salary standards in the public healthcare system. > 3. Free systems create extra demand from people who don't really want to be there and are simply going for the lifestyle, which may in turn keep others who really want to go out How so? If the academic standards are raised to compensate for higher demand, only the most talented and willful be able to complete their studies. On the contrary, in an educational system where money is often the gating factor, you lose talented people who cannot afford tuition. > 4. Governments may pay per college student but those funds aren't distributed equally. When I went almost nothing was spent on first-year students. Most of that money was diverted to research activities, which brings into question the quality of education the government was paying for; Professors are contractually obligated to spend a large percentage of their time on teaching. As a consequence, assuming you don't teach empty classrooms, the total teaching load across a faculty scales roughly with the number of students. The first-year classes are cheaper to teach per student because classes are larger. But if you break everyone into groups of 15-20 people with their own TA (another professor or graduate student), the quality of the teaching doesn't suffer. In fact, the best teachers usually teach the first-year classes. I don't see a difference here compared to US universities. In Denmark there's no such thing as a research-only professorship supported by per-student government contributions, and equipment expenses and research assistant salaries are only covered at a very low level or not at all. My cousin is a biomedical researcher at the University of Aarhus, and his group spends an inordinate amount of time on applying for research grants to cover such expenses. That part is not very different from the US. > 6. Demand will be increased by other countries. In Germany, for example, you have a lot of Brazilians who go there for free university, typically going there for 6-12 months prior to learn German. That's a real and present problem but it can mitigated by stricter quotas. From talking to academics at Danish universities, my sense is that many Ph. D. programs are being overrun by Chinese students who are studious but not very talented. For various reasons, that hasn't happened at the undergraduate level.