Wojtek Sokolowski
So if you concentrate only of the horrible end e.g. because this is what you happened to encounter in your travels in this vast wasteland, the European "average" looks much better in comparison. But if you happened to stumble into the high end of the spectrum - no, not the Johns Hopkins, Harvards or Yales, but, say, the California Community College System "integrated" with U of California and Cal State U before it came under the Repug assault in the 1990s - which offered truly excellent and very affordable education to _everyone_ not just those within a narrow age range . . .
Wojtek
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I studied French and Italian at a California CC (Grossmont) in the early 80s. Cost: five dollars per semester, plus textbooks - seven dollars if one purchased a parking permit. There were ten such institutions in San Diego County alone. My French professor - a Bulgarian by way of a twenty-year residence in Paris - stated repeatedly that there was no system remotely comparable anywhere in Europe, or anywhere else, so far as she knew. Of course, the students bitched about the cost of the textbooks . . . .