I went to college in Sweden and had all that you had, I didn't pay anything. I received about 1000-1500$ a month for attending school from the government.
I know Europe is a diverse place, but I've studied at three universities in Europe (Germany and France) and at each of them I often had problems with computer access due to the labs being used for classes. This was an issue even as a graduate student.
Access to professors outside of class was also difficult. Where I was at in Germany, the professors would have about 4 hours per week scheduled where they were available for help or questions. At the end of each open-hours block they would go out into the hall and tell the 5-10 people waiting in line to see them that they would have to come back in a couple days. Compare this to the university I was at in the US where professors would practically beg students to come talk to them about homework assignments, lectures, etc.
I also had much greater autonomy in the US when it came to lab work (and course selection as well). They trusted us to use the equipment. As an undergrad in the US we were shown how to use an SEM and then left alone with it to play around with it and try different options, scan different objects, etc. For the SEM lab I had as a graduate student in France we watched a technician use the machine and tell us about what you can do with it and that was it. I felt like we were being treated like little kids. There weren't even any machine shops, 3d printers, soldering irons, etc. available for students to use.
In the experience that I had, the US university had much higher quality facilities than the ones I was at in Europe (I'm not talking about the lecture quality here). Certainly, one could argue that the increased cost isn't worth the increased quality, but I did notice a big difference between those four schools.
It's important to put numbers in perspective. Every US citizen spends $98k over their expected lifetime on the military, for example. An average Swedish citizen spends $46k on state funded university and higher education over their expected lifetime (which is only slightly higher).
That said, it should be obvious that the Sweden model doesn't suit conditions in the US (one is a small country in Northern Europe, one is almost a continent), but one should be able to discuss these things without the straw man of how state spending is impossible in the US. After all, military spending is possible, and that is probably the most socialistic system of them all, in the sense that it is state planned and politically mandated.
If you look at the historic context of military vs. education spending, I don't think it's a straw man at all to point the difficulty of raising non-defense spending. In fact, the difficulty of raising taxes in the US is just put in more stark lighting when in perspective of the amounts spent on the military vs. everything else.
I'm not saying state spending is impossible, just that raising it for non-military items is exceedingly difficult. That's not the only reason why the US university system is worse in x way than y country's, but when we're discussing public funding of universities we have to acknowledge the political and fiscal realities of trying to do something about it. I say that when accounting for those realities and the difference in public funding levels for education and other programs, it's no surprise that we have students in debt.
I took the military speding figures from worldbank.org, and higher education spending from the Swedish national budget for 2015. Population and life expectancy figures from Wikipedia.
Sweden also doesn't have universities that match up to the US when it comes to a ~$50k tuition tier. $50,000 per year is a lot, and buys you access to the best universities on earth, most of which are in the US. Harvard's tuition is around $44,000 for example.
Sweden is a country with the population of New York, but have one (sometimes two) universitites in a global top ten ranking of their respective subjects. So if you must compare to something US, do it with a large city.
Sweden has two universities in the top ~100. Boston has three. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh have two, mostly in the top 50.
That's because your source is coarse grained. Look at a list of specific subjects, in my example medicine (and an old list of maritime biology institutions, hence "sometimes"), and you'll find the counter examples.
But hey, I'm cherrypicking data here, so it's not relevant to anything else than as a counter data point to a very broad and wrong statement.
While this might be true for maybe population size or territory, the govermental structure is completely different. ..also there are huge cultural differences (language; diff. social path dependencies etc.)
I don't think the similarities justify comparing US states to European countries.
No, you shouldn't. European nation states bear little resemblance to federal states, neither historically, culturally or economically.
The point was not that comparisons between states and cities are somehow more valid, but to illustrate that the differences in higher education are most likely due to the vast population difference.
but obviously university rankings are only weakly related to the quality of undergrad education. US universities are the "best" at research... not hard to understand
