How much does higher education cost? Depends on where the school is located. In the U.S., college can come with a hefty price tag. In Europe, however, many students receive a free education.

Germany is the latest European country to offer free higher education to its students. And it’s not just free for citizens — international students can enroll in state-run German universities for free.

Germany joined a growing list of European countries that offer free higher education, including Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Greece. Some also provide a stipend for living expenses.

Supporters of these policies have said higher education is a universal right for all, while opponents argue there’s no such thing as a truly free education. In the meantime, Germany’s colleges may start filling up with students from all over the world seeking to avoid debt while getting a degree.

For more on Germany’s free education policies the Heat panel was joined by:

• Howard Hotson: a professor of history at the University of Oxford
• Richard Vedder: the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity
• Mark Huelsman: a senior policy analyst with Demos, a public policy organization.

“Student loans have become the primary financing mechanism for higher education in this country and that wasn’t always the case,” Huelsman said. “The Pell Grant, which is the cornerstone piece of financial aid for students in this country used to cover about three-quarters of what it costs to go to college, and now it covers only about a third, and that has to do with the rising cost of college and stagnant grant aid over time, but what that means more and more students are taking on loans and if they graduate at all they’re graduating with very high levels of debt.”

Vedder said that the U.S. financial aid system is dysfunctional and inefficient. If tuition fees in the last 30 years rose as they did in the early part of the 20th century there would be no education debt crisis today.

“The extraordinary increase in tuition fees has been fueled by the irrational, crazy nature of the federal student aid system… where you can borrow the amount up the the cost of attendance and that is roughly whatever the universities decide it should be. So we have a system where we in effect incentivize universities to raise fees in respect to the loan program,” Vedder said.

Hotson said prior to 2012 domestic U.K. students paid 3,000 pounds ($4,500) in tuition, but then the new coalition government decided to raise money by removing direct public subsidies for higher education. Students now pay 9,000 pounds ($15,000) for college.

“We’re only a few years into this new regime, and already its’s becoming apparent that the new regime, despite troubling the burden on students, is going to still cost the taxpayer almost as much as the previous one did,” he said.

Graduating in debt

For recent American university graduate Greg Dube, a degree in chemical engineering came with a hefty price tag: $150,000. After funding his education mostly with student loans, he hoped the degree would lead to a stable career. It didn’t quite work out that way.