Do they? If government loan programs treat all degrees interchangeably, why do you have differential pricing for STEM degrees and Liberal arts, with the latter being cheaper and STEM, law and medicine degrees being the most expensive.
They are more expensive because the programs cost more to run. The professors have more job prospects outside of academia, so that drives up their wages. They also need more expensive resources (labs, legal libraries, etc.).
> I was wrong about China, but apparently it is free in India.
Education has NEVER been free in India. You have to pay a lot of money at the University level. Almost all education is now privatized.
Germany, OTOH, has FREE education upto the PhD level and it does not figure on the Wikipedia page - This is exactly why Wikipedia should not be a citation source. People submit wrong information and it never gets corrected, perpetuating lies.
In India, some government education institutes are heavily subsidized (think IIT and the state REC's) but the rest of the private colleges you have to BUY seats - so your parents financial clout decides if you get to study at a good university or NOT.
"Students pay subsidized tuition at a fraction of the real cost of their education. The Indian government subsidizes over 80% of the costs of the IIT, with alumni donations only accounting for under 3% of the system’s budget. “While the total government funding to most other engineering colleges is around $2-4 million per year,” a critical article writes, “the amount varies between $18-26 million per year for each IIT.”"
I dont get why the Indian government will spend millions on subsidizing and educating its students and then allowing them to migrate to USA - if that occurred in the USA there would be an uproar on why the government is using the tax-payers money to fund another country's workforce. Something the Indian tax-payer needs to think about, eh?
The Indian govt is surely stupid in subsidizing higher education in place of primary education. However, there is a flip side. Even though the people are allowed to migrate, it is the same people who have brought the IT industry to Indian shores. According to a study commission admittedly by IITians, there is a positive economic benefit to funding IITs.
More than stupid, the Indian government is clueless and careless about how it spends its earnings from the 2-3% of Indians that actually pay income tax. That coupled with rampant corruption and politicians only interested in saving their vote-banks adds to the woeful state of affairs.
If the Indian citizens started being more demanding about how their money was being spent, on whom and the ROI per rupee of tax collected, the government and the politicians would be forced to change. See, http://openspending.org/
> America should make it as easy as possible for highly
> motivated and talented individuals to come here. Jobs,
> heck, entire new industries will be created.
America also needs to remember that the high quality engineer they sent home has the world at his feet - if he has migrated out of his home country, the world is his oyster. He can migrate to any other country offering him a job and will not have to limit himself to the H1B.
