Well, how is German education funded? Do they use tax subsidies? Generous donations? How? I would also add that regular university education is overhyped in the U.S. anyways. We don’t have enough technical or trade jobs. With the majority of trade jobs, you have a cheap tuition, and hardly a fraction of the debt. Then with a few years experience working the trade, you can sometimes be making over $100K annually. If people think they are above a lot of these essential, yet not so badly paying jobs, we are in serious trouble.
We could institute a job for student loan debt forgiveness program and just write off the debt for every year graduates are working.
Free tuition requires higher taxes. After the Obamacare fiasco, the public is not in a mood for a government takeover of student loans.
But that may well change if we face a toxic student loan debt meltdown.
My brother-in-law lived in Germany. They pay taxes out the wazoo.