How Does Germany Afford Free Tuition For All Of Its Citizens?
ATTN: Ok - I don't get it. How can a country with 80+ million people entirely fund higher education and not go bankrupt? Where is the money coming from?
Even before this news, Germany had extremely low tuition and fees – around $600 per student. In other words, around $14,000 less than what students here have to pay. Germany, and many other European countries, view higher education as more of a public than a private benefit. They can afford this for a couple reasons. First, they simply agree to pay higher taxes. Second, Germany has a lower percentage of students go on to college than we have here in the U.S. Here, particularly at public schools, college costs have risen as a response to lower levels of public support from states, and increasing numbers of students going to school.
ATTN: Have US elected officials weighed in? What are they saying? Is there any chance this will happen here in the USA?
Don’t hold your breath that we will have tuition-free education anytime in the U.S. soon. But that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have a more affordable and equitable system. At the state level, Tennessee has introduced a program of “free” community college tuition, with Chicago and several other U.S. states following suit with proposals, though even that program is pretty limited in the benefit it provides students. At the federal level, policymakers have been primarily focused on how to reduce current debt, or help struggling borrowers with monthly payments by enrolling more borrowers in income-based repayment plans. Others have been focused on the inadequacy of grant aid in meeting the needs of students, but there has yet to be a push to fully abolish tuition and fees, or take much autonomy away from the states and institutions who make those decisions.
And obviously, our system differs from Germany in some fundamental ways – students at major U.S. public and private universities tend to have more flexibility, more student services, and a far more expansive array of campus activities. But it’s important to remember that a high-cost, debt-based system was not always the norm here. Just 20 years ago, fewer than half of graduates borrowed for college (compared to 7 in 10 graduates today). And just 30 years ago, you could finance a year’s worth of tuition at a minimum-wage summer job. But due to deep and unrelenting state budget cuts, inadequate grant aid, and poor targeting of some of the subsidies we do provide, that time seems as foreign as Germany’s system does today.
At Demos, we’ve created a proposal for a new federal matching grant program that would provide states with incentives to reinvest in higher education to levels that once made it affordable, and to target funds at the students who most need them. Our goal is to return the U.S. to a system of primarily debt-free higher education (meaning, essentially that you could pay for college with a summer and/or part-time job), particularly for low-income and middle-class students.
http://www.attn.com/stories/211/how-does-germany-afford-free-tuition-all-its-citizens
This is an interesting article about the roadblocks to lowering the costs of higher education in the U.S.,here's a link to Demos (I admit I've never heard of this group)proposal:
http://www.demos.org/publication/affordable-college-compact
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But it is exclusionary.
What if we had a system where only those scoring 1300 or better on the SAT was admitted to a university (fully government paid) and everybody else (the "not worthy"
had to go to trade school or just get a job?
And students can re-apply later if their scores are not high enough. Though if you actually knew anything about the German school system you would know that by the time most finish Gymnasium, they have the equivalent of what we consider here a college degree or at least several years of college level education.
As a senior high school exchange student to West Germany in the mid 1980's, I was placed in their 10th grade class! I lacked two credits to graduate, was in academically gifted classes, and was one of the top in my school in the US. There, I was a 10th grader. 
My parents taught college for almost 40 years. Not all who go to college are academically worthy of attending college. Racking up tons of student loan debt to get a degree that they will never use or maybe not even finishing school altogether is not helping them either.
The German system is far superior to our own, and I would take its implementation in a heart beat here.
College is not, and should not necessarily be, for everyone.
his troubles. I like your idea of a GI Bill for everybody based on progress. My Dad was also a Marine in the mid 1950s,he stayed stateside though. 
