What I (as a fellow European who considers the American student loan craze equally bizarre) read into the "struggle" part of nightski's post is that people approach a given education opportunity very differently knowing that it is costing them (or, probably even stronger in most cases: their parents) a lot of money, vs. knowing that it is free. I sure hope that I would have crunched harder during that time knowing that it was a crazy expensive bet and not just the opportunity cost of not entering the workforce early.
What I am not so sure is wether that hard crunch would have actually been better. I suspect that without the more freewheeling approach of European universities, I would have gone even deeper into the pointlessness of learning for the grade instead of learning for the education.
Generally speaking, my impression is that many people wildly overestimate the per-head cost of low intensity university education. Without artificially inflated budgets (driven by the misuse of tuition height as an indicator of academic quality), a few lecture halls, some professors and the usual lower echelons of academia who are basically donating their time for peanuts and the chance to occasionally publish seems to be an absolute bargain compared to other programmes designed for keeping people off the streets.
What I am not so sure is wether that hard crunch would have actually been better. I suspect that without the more freewheeling approach of European universities, I would have gone even deeper into the pointlessness of learning for the grade instead of learning for the education.
Generally speaking, my impression is that many people wildly overestimate the per-head cost of low intensity university education. Without artificially inflated budgets (driven by the misuse of tuition height as an indicator of academic quality), a few lecture halls, some professors and the usual lower echelons of academia who are basically donating their time for peanuts and the chance to occasionally publish seems to be an absolute bargain compared to other programmes designed for keeping people off the streets.