Why are American universities and med schools so expensive when other countries are doing it right?

[ucbalumnus]

@MYOS1634

It depends. British and Irish universities have active Student Unions and “halls” for first-years.
But French, German, Italian, Finnish… universities rely on the city they’re in. Students go to the doctor’s or health center in town. They use the town’s sports clubs. If they want tutors, they must look for them and pay for them. They live with their parents and commute, or share an apartment and commute, or live in a studio in town, or sometimes in private student residences. Often, there’s no “campus”, but rather a group of buildings in the city, with major streets and few pedestrian areas (very rarely a “quad”). The buildings may be set in the same neighborhood loosely linked by common subjects… or may be a 30mn tram ride apart

Note that in Canada, many of the “flagship” and other universities are in heavily populated metro areas, so that many students can live at home and commute (and many do), even though they also have dorms for students coming from sparsely populated parts of the province or country where there are no nearby universities.

There are some US states like Arizona that have similar population distributions that allow having just a few universities to put a very large percentage of the population in commuting range.