You'd be surprised. Take Spain: College is very cheap, but in 2014, the median student that graduated was 27... and that was with a plain degree. This also didn

You'd be surprised. Take Spain: College is very cheap, but in 2014, the median student that graduated was 27... and that was with a plain degree. This also didn't mean that most of their college degrees were on any topic that helped their job prospects. If you spend most of your 20s working hard on a course of study that doesn't lead to a career that pays much better than minimum wage, going to college sure isn't a no-brainer. This isn't purely a matter of motivation, but of the quality of their school, their interest in teaching, and setting sensible exams. My US college had plenty of Spanish engineering students which had gotten nowhere in their Spanish college, and were doing very well under the US system. Nothing like seeing engineers now at NASA that were unable to pass a single class in their first year in Madrid. Salaries can also be quite different across borders. Studying computer science in the US isn't cheap, but the jobs available right when you are done are not paying anywhere near the same as those of the Spanish developer. You see American companies opening software shops in the least developed parts of Europe, and a big part of it is that you might be getting up to 5 developers for the price of one. I emigrated because I knew that the Spanish college route was far more dubious than a pretty average US college, even paying for the whole thing. So a no-brainer? Hardly. And the life path that makes sense in 2010 might not make all that much sense in 2030. Just like someone that became a mining engineer, specializing in coal, had a very different career if he made his choice in the 1950s, vs doing the same in 2005.