Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They get to keep a greater portion of their income I always see this come up during discussions about how the US compares to other developed countries. I think the mentality is slightly different in the EU. If you were raised knowing that your income was going to be taxed at 50% but you also got free healthcare, education, welfare assistance, etc., you’d probably learn to value those things over buying a bigger TV…
The problem with free education is that as more people become educated, the signaling effect of education becomes diluted. So the Europeans are paying for something that decreases in real value the more that people have access to it. That's a self defeating policy, especially since it encourages people to remain in academia for significantly longer than they would otherwise, because hey, it's paid for by the taxpayer…
So if education is undervalued in the European model, and overvalued in the U.S. system, perhaps it just a matter of finding out which system properly values education? Currently, the U.S. system is seeing runaway inflation in education costs, isn't it? How does it serve America to have such education this expensive? In the 1970's, its possible their model was sustainable but once demand was cut by subsequent, smaller generation size, and the supply of colleges stayed the same, its pretty easy to see how unsustainable this is. The European model simply remove education from the job qualification equation, much as the developed world has done for health care, for instance. You certainly need to be at a certain level of health if you're going to be employed, so developing countries at the start of the 20th century made great investment in public health to cut the communicability of disease with public health infrastructure around inoculations and early detection of epidemics, etc. Think of the impact of diseases such as Spanish Flu and later, polio. Much of this public health investment was done to preserve the stability of the workforce, and less so out of humanitarianism. But, of course, the workforce support society and humanity at large, too.
The only hope for many Americans paying student debt in their mid-twenties (and beyond) is the inheritance they will receive from their boomer parents. While I am not quite that young, I do know many that are factoring inheritance into their retirement planning.