___ First of all, a lot of schools give discounts if you pay taxes. EU citizens benefit from reduced tuition at nearly all EU-universities. US also has a similar system called “in-state tuition”, but it only applies to people who study at public schools in the state where they live (a.k.a. pay taxes in). For example, UIUC (well-known for engineering, in Illinois) has an out-of-state tuition of $38,398-$46,498, but only $18,046-$23,426 for Illinois residents. Obviously this is still a lot, which leads to the main point: US and EU follow two very different takes on “who pays for college”. There is a major debate in economics (I think initiated by right-leaning economists) that reimbursing for university tuition is regressive, because you are paying for already well-off individuals (typically educated families send their kids to college) to further improve their earning potential. The counterargument is that university education improves the collective well-being of society and leads to positive externalities, so govts should still pay for university. This is also why nearly all countries provide free K9/K12 education, because no mainstream economists deny the positive externalities of early-life education But because of this ideological divergence… US universities opted for a strategy where governments mostly don’t reimburse college-level education. If the “customers” are footing the entire bill of course it would be more expensive. But it is technically a more progressive system, because underprivileged kids who defied the odds would get reimbursed by the government (such as Pell Grants) or by private foundations and can typically go to uni for almost no cost. EU in general opted for the other, more humanitarian approach, where everyone can afford to go to college, because the governments paid part of the bill. Personal opinion though, I don’t think the economics debate captured the full extent of what actually happened. For EU, yes the system is “more regressive” on paper, but you do end up getting more college-educated people which improves societal well-being. And the American system did indeed breed innovation! … but not necessarily in the “cheaper” direction. Some schools like Purdue University specialized into lowering tuition costs, a lot of others specialized into providing better “services” or “experiences” while massively jacking up their tuition costs because students can just do the student loan thing anyway Even within EU there are differences though: unless I misread it, KU Leuven (really good school in Belgium) tuition is only 1k € and under 10k € for non-EU citizens, which is half as expensive as TU Delft (Netherlands) (somewhere close to 20k € for non-EU I believe) And as a final note, USC is pretty expensive even by US standards. If I remember correctly, even LA folks kind of joke of it as the “rich-kids school”. A lot of the public University of California schools are much more affordable