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Comment by semajian | Hacker News Reader

I guess the most prominent counterexample is Germany, which has basically free tuition. They also have different kinds of high schools preparing people for universities or trades, not everyone needs to go to university.

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I know that it's worked elsewhere, but that doesn't mean it will work here (without some cultural changes). I'm not saying college shouldn't be free - maybe it should - but I'm saying that the problems we have today with underemployment aren't going to be fixed by free tuition.

We first have to undo decades of treating trades as a lesser class of work, and telling everyone they have to go to college and "follow their passion".

Aren’t employment rates in the U.S. doing pretty well at this point? I think the companies struggling to find people are skilled labor—the likes of which require 4 year degrees for a lot of their positions.

Employment is low, yes. But a lot of people are underemployed - working retail or Starbucks or something, in spite of having a college degree. We don’t have a labor shortage or a job shortage - there are plenty of both. What we have is a mismatch between the skills that people who want jobs have to offer, and the skills that employers require.

If all good education was free there would be no private Universities in Germany. But there are many and they all charge fees.

Also, _not_ all public universities are free.

Typically you pay $200 per semester in enrollment fees (bus ticket to the city included). And while private universities in Germany exists they are absolutely tiny compared to the public ones.

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