free college edu in Western europe?

Someone told me that Western European countries except the United Kingdom provide free college education for their citizens. True or false???

 

germany does,
though "for free" is getting more and more just for the undergraduate level, whereas you have to pay a lot for the new Master´s programs (and those Master programs are more or less the only ones that are taught in English).

Austria has introduced tuition fees about 1 year ago (I think it´s roughy 1.000 dollars a year),

Switzerland also hat tuition fees.

but - as I said - in general only the expensive Master (mostly MBA) programs are taught in English language...

holland demands a fee of about 3.000 dollars a year for bachelor´s and also many master´s programs, sometimes also in English.

greets,
trigger

 

Dear tommy,

There still some countries that provide free education, but with an influx of non eu students taking advantage of this, the situation is rapidly changing. Most governments are implementing rules and regulations, that non eu citizens have to pay a higher rate than the eu citizens.

The best option you might have is to enter the eu and study in any country but the UK and then try to move around This is doen by a lot of asian students

Good luck

 

As I was growing up there were two parts to the "myth?" of a European college education. The first was the part about it being free. Several stories circulated about people who became "professional students," spending literally decades in accumulating degrees of various sorts and never actually using them for anything, never getting a job, etc because they were provided with a place to live, food to eat, and lots of interesting conversation (much of which took place in some cafe, with bottles of wine, etc) The second half of the myth however, was that in order to enjoy such a lifestyle you had to pass an extremely rigorous examination, a sort of university entrance exam. The vast majority were reported to fail this exam and were therefore excluded from university study forever. I never bothered to check on the veracity of either aspect of this myth. It always amused me however, because it seemed to be the exact opposite of the situation here in the USA where virtually anyone,regardless of their previous school achievements, if the have sufficient money, can get into some college somewhere.
Jack

 

Up till the year 2 k,
at least for Germany and Austria, this was not (all) a myth:
university education up till the doctoral level used to be totally free (surely not the living)...

But things change...

 

The phenomenon of "professional students" is quite common in Canada. The government has bursaries programs that covers the expenses of the student, so you have many double PhDs in fields with little demand like history or religion studies. For a PhD in religion studies is better to continue studying for a post doc or another PhD than going to work at McDonalds. So if the university allows up to 7 years for each PhD, you can easily accumulate 3 in a life span. I remeber when I was a graduate student, we used to have this guy coming to the grad student association who claimed to have three PhDs and going for the fourth one.