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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

It's probably my Canadian experience talking, but this sentence:

> 85% of graduates have less than $50,000 in student loans. Paid off over 20 years, that’s really not much.

It is pretty terrifying that you manage to mentally justify going in debt for 20 years over your college education. I understand that given a good job it's easy to pay it back, but I never even borrowed even a tenth of that to complete my engineering degree and I've probably paid my education back several time in taxes to the government.

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But there is no magic you are paying higher taxes and that’s not for 20 years it’s forever

There are two sources of "magic":

1. Efficiency. Canadian universities deliver similar/better products at much lower cost. Not just cost at point of use, but actual "amount of money spend annually to deliver education".

2. Financing model. Taxation allows you to fund things without paying interest to a middle man. If you pay off a set of loans whose principle is 50K, but with 5%-7% interest rates, then you're paying a lot more than 50K. So even if the products were equal in price, the taxation model might work out ahead.

thats great in theory the thing is though that US student will make 15K more after tax so break even will be 3.3y

1. That number seems way off. What are your assumptions?

2. I haven't looked at the data, but I'm going to go out on a VERY short branch here and assert that the entire delta between US and CA tax rates is not consumed by higher education.

this would obviously depend on the field but generally there is significantly lower comp in Canada vs US for the same job. Taxes are lower in US too.

> but generally there is significantly lower comp in Canada

Right, I figured. This is entirely orthogonal to the discussion about the problems with higher ed in the us...

Honestly (I know that's not true of all states) but I worked in California and the taxes I was paying there were higher than my taxes in Quebec/British Columbia.

Yes taxation is higher, but I still feel like we get a lot more bang for our bucks here.

Well that's one exception but in CA public Unis are good and fairly cheap.

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