When I tell my friends that I am studying in Germany, the first question I get asked is how much it costs. If you’re from a country with reasonable education costs, you might be surprised by this; surely questions about quality of education or networking opportunities would come first. But where I come from, the US, these are all secondary compared to concerns about the cost of university.
My friends and I grew up with the incredibly expensive US university system, where a year at a public university could set your family back as much as US$30,000 and private universities can easily cost $60,000 a year. Multiply that times four years (or as is becoming increasingly common, five years – just for a bachelor’s degree), and it very quickly adds up to staggering numbers.
You don’t need to have a very firm understanding of finance to realize just how detrimental that can be to a family, even in a country where the average income is $67,000. There are hundreds of thousands of parents who have spent all their retirement money and savings to put their kids through college. In fact, the cost of university is so high that many families simply cannot afford it and are forced to end their children’s education at high school, or consider a career path such as the military just to get a scholarship.
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