The high price of a free college education in Sweden

What is the use in assuming that anyone who has come to a conclusion other than your own has had the wool pulled over their eyes? No self-respecting Swede believes that university is 'free' in the sense you mean it; the costs are palpable to all taxpayers. The argument in favor of 'free' higher education—that is, education for which the costs are borne collectively, rather than by individual students who are presumed not to have funding to match their abilities—typically runs that a better and more widely educated country is a more productive country, and that students of higher education will as a body more than pay back the money given them in the form of schooling. What's more, they will pay their costs forward, offering the same opportunities for succeeding generations.

You argue against this belief, after misrepresenting its proponents as people 'tricked' into thinking that no money has changed hands. That showed poor faith—something that is discouraged on this site—but, I'll move on. You insist that students given a leg up are more likely to squander their chances and to become parasitic, taking more than they put in. But you've given absolutely no evidence for this. Your 'reality check' is nothing more than supposition. Please direct us to numbers that indicate that Swedes are more likely to take degrees which you deem 'worthless,' and less likely to take STEM degrees or study a trade, than countries without 'free' education. Perhaps compare these figures to the US (you're clearly American, as shown by your line about the fervor surrounding Bernie Sanders among Swedish undergraduates). The US has quite high post-secondary tuition, even at its public universities, so if you're right in your thinking there should be far fewer 'parasites' there.

On what grounds do you speak about the left-leaning faculty in the Swedish university system? I certainly have no first- or second-hand experience that I could counter your claims with, but I suspect you have none by which to make them.

In general, a system of 'free' education is at least intended to give each generation as clean a sheet as possible. People may be self-made, but their children are not. 'Free' education provides (better) opportunities for those willing to put in the effort and do the work, regardless of their parents' abilities to land them in a good situation. No system rewards work and only work absolutely; but this is one attempt to do so, and it behooves anyone who wants to engage in actual conversation (as, for instance, on an online forum) to address it as such.

That speaks more for the simplicity of the courses of your university more than against my position. Are you really Swedish? I'm going to assume not. Engineering classes at Swedish universities typically don't give points that add up to a grade cutoff point. You might get an average grade of all projects and finals. The final exam is typically 5 hours long with 5-10 very difficult questions. In my CS program we had to work 60+ hours minimum a week, and classes often had 70%+ failure rates. This is not an environment where you can get a second job, and to my knowledge, none of my classmates or anyone I knew did so, except during summers.

I paid my tuition almost entirely through co-ops (6th month internships) and then worked while in school to pay my day to day bills. I was also very lucky to have a safety net from my parents if I needed it, although I didn't.