system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The European-style "free" higher education proposed by Bernie, among others, would never work in the US.

I'm quite liberal but I think that this is a unattainable goal for a number of reasons, primarily:

1. American College culture. Americans expect and place value on the college experience, and that costs a ton of money. Dorms, stadiums, sports teams, Greek life, drama clubs, student newspapers, political/religious/hobby groups, paid guest speakers. European Universities have much more of a focus on pure academics and cost much less as a result.

2. The American desire for everyone to go to college. No matter what you end up doing, everyone still wants to go to college, and most parents strive to send to send them, and rarely accept a trade as an acceptable and equal option. Most of the kids that go to college here in Switzerland do so with the goal of a career that necessitates higher education. (sciences, medicine, etc). The rest go to trade schools or enter apprentiships in their teens.

Any attempt at making this idea workable will have to be focused on making colleges more selective and less of a necessity for the average American, and will be met with a massive bipartisan outcry far worse than what was seen during the Obamacare debate.
gpt
Well, 1. is solvable. If education is free, no one has the ability to complain if their expectations are not met - they aren't paying for this stuff, so if they want to have it, they can figure out how to get it themselves. The government doesn't need to be paying for these amenities, since they aren't essential, but a university may choose to spend a portion of its budget on student activities - which most European universities, even the free ones, do. And after a few generations, American culture will shift away from their movie-based expectations and will come to understand that university is a place for learning. 

For 2. We have this in the UK, where education is *essentially* free - ie, the payback rates on the loans are so low you don't even notice it, and unless you're extremely well-payed you'll never actually pay it off. We also have a culture of wanting our kids to go to university, so similar to the US, we get a lot of people going to university just for the sake of going to university, with no particular career in mind. It's not ideal, but it works fine, and it's better than the alternative if the alternative is spending tens of thousands of pounds on it, even for the people who already have a career path.

If these were the only problems, free higher education in the US would work fine. The real problem is that America is the land of looking out for yourself. Even if you shuffled the budget around so that giving everyone free education had absolutely no increase in tax, people would still not vote for it because they hate the idea of their money helping other people to succeed. It's the same argument that you see against nationalised healthcare. People are more concerned about their taxes paying for someone else's health than about whether or not they're actually paying more taxes. 

There's also the universities to consider. Given how extortionate the prices they currently charge are, they may lobby against a program that could potentially see them get less money. The only reason British universities don't complain too much is because they can still charge excessive prices to foreign students (which we get a *lot* of). As such, any solution to this would probably have to be one that increases the number of foreign students coming in and paying high prices for education, and because of how big the US actually is, there's going to be an awful lot of american universities that no foreign student wants to go to in the first place.