While the US is definitely an outlier (especially in private universities), remember that: 1. It's not just education per se, it's public _research_ in univers

While the US is definitely an outlier (especially in private universities), remember that: 1. It's not just education per se, it's public _research_ in universities that takes up a lot of the funding, and that is expensive. And the marriage of higher teaching and research is a solid principle (often identified with von Humboldt, the Prussian minister of education who successfully promoted this model of a university). 2. Cheap tuition is often/usually the lesser part of funding, with the major being state budgets and donations by individual benefactors and commercial companies (or in rare cases, profits off of university endowments).