That's not a solution at all, because it will price out way too many students.
The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).
> The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).
This is a totally fine system, but would change US tertiary education massively. Much of the state university increases in tuition since the GFC have been driven by exactly the opposite behaviour (cut state funding, make it up in tuition).
Germany and other EU countries that offer free tuition begin segregating students into vocational and university tracks starting around age 10. Only about 30% of students qualify for university. The rest stop school around 15-16 and go into vocational training. These aren't student choices, their dictated by the school system.
The US would never approve of a school system that told parents that their children weren't allowed to go to university and had to go into vocational training.
Most states already have affordable tuition for in-state residents. California is middle of the pack, and CSU tuition is less than $10k/year. (Nationwide, public in-state 4-year tuition ranges from ~$5k/yr to ~$15k/yr.)
For most students at public 4-year universities in the US, room & board costs significantly more than tuition. Even in those EU countries where tuition is free, average student loan debt is often >$20k USD because of this. By way of comparison, average student loan debt in the US is ~$40k USD, and that includes private school and out-of-state student tuition as well as room & board. Note that at least for the US, $40k is the mean; the median debt is <$30k. And these numbers are totals, not per year.
Perhaps one of the best ways to address the college affordability "crisis" would be to build more dormitories. The capital expenses could be publicly funded, and then charge students maintenance costs. But for various reasons, including NIMBY development barriers as well as modern expectations (see, e.g., the vitriol spewed about the windowless UCSB Munger Hall bedrooms), schools have long ago neglected this aspect.
That is what we did in the past, and why my undergrad degree didn't cost me nearly as much as someone would pay to get the same degree today from the same university. We've decimated state funding for public universities.
> When students have "skin in the game", i.e. they are paying for it, they will work to get their money's worth out of it.
For one, Europe's academic system works well enough to disprove this zero-sum ideology.
Making everything financialized has two serious downsides: first, it excludes a bunch of people - those who financially cannot afford to take the risk of failure (because you can't discharge student loans in a bankruptcy) even if they get a stipend, and then it leads to humanities and "niche" subjects being either killed off entirely as the chance of ever earning back the student loan is very slim, or the only students for these subjects are those who "come from money", both of which has negative impact for society at large.
I went through free K-12 public school. The caring about getting educated was performative, not reality. Neither the teachers nor the students particularly tried.
> How many German universities are ranked top 40 globally? How many American?
University rankings are mostly nonsense. They generally over-weight English speaking universities because most of the "high impact" journals are in English. The UK also does well by these metrics, but fundamentally academic research and teaching are very different things, and incentivising high output research institutions to focus on the research breaks the social purpose of universities which is to turn out educated undergraduates.
The German model is to focus more on teaching, which is a more sustainable approach than chasing the finite research dollars.
The solution is to do what Germany and most of the EU does - pay universities with tax money and do not charge students anything at all (or maybe a few hundred to thousand euros).