'Free' college in Europe isn't really free
While Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has garnered populist support with his debt-free college proposal, several economists recently told NPR's "Planet Money" that they don't like the plan.
Their main gripe: The plan should target students who actually need free tuition rather than spend money to pay for everybody's public education.
Still, Sanders has pointed to free tuition in European countries like Germany and Denmark to prove the models can be successful.
"Free" is a relative term since tax payers absorb that cost.
European countries often differ greatly from the US in substantive ways. Their college enrollment percentages, for example, are much lower than in America.
Europe also traditionally has higher taxes than the US, which allows those countries to offer additional social services.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its 2015 report on the tax burden on earnings among member countries.
Their report ranks countries by their tax wedge percentage. The tax wedge is the dollar measure of the income tax rate. The countries below with the red arrows offer free college, with the exception of the US. There are other European countries that offer free college, but the countries below are the most well-known examples.
The percentage is calculated by taking tertiary enrollment as a percentage of the total population of students who graduated within the last five years. For all countries, with the exception of Finland, the US has a much higher percentage of students who have enrolled in post-high school education.
While Sanders plans to fund free college by imposing a tax on "Wall Street speculators," free college in America would likely be a more complicated endeavor than it is in Europe.