Tuition fees, student loans, and other manifestations of cost sharing: Variations and misconceptions

Higher education finance in any single country, and vastly more so in international comparative perspective, is an enormously complex topic. The reliance in any country on tuition fees to bear part of the rising costs of public higher education is influenced in part by the particular histories, cultures, and dominant political and ideological currents of the country and the moment. But higher education—regardless of ideology or political system and regardless of the presumed mix of public and private benefits—is everywhere expensive. Virtually all countries are struggling with these surging costs, the volatile politics of tuition fees, the competing needs for scarce governmental revenues, and the complexity of student loans, along with the need to reconcile the economic and social imperative for quality higher education with the political and moral needs to increase higher educational participation.