Well, that's what extreme capitalism brings you. I'm not holding a hammer and a sickle here, but I'm convinced that the right to access a good education is more important than the right to sell it. Same goes for health services.
My personal experience: I went to a public University in my country. My parents paid around $800 per year (I had a 50% discount, because I have 3 younger siblings). I don't know how high it's ranked. It is honestly not something people ask. Most public schools are simply good enough.
We have some private schools, but a lot of students end up there because they don't want to put a lot of effort so their daddies pay them a title. And since the schools don't want to lose them they give them a pass, or dumb subjects down. So a lot of private schools are worse (in the sense that they require less effort) than public ones. To the point where some job offers started including the clause: "Any Student with the so-and-so degree, except those from this Particular Private School".
Not having a hierarchy of good and bad universities is a deliberate policy decision. Before ~1968 Germany had elite universities, like Göttingen, Tübingen and Heidelberg among others, equivalent to the position of HYPS or Oxbridge, with other excellent universities in the rank below, like Columbia and Cal Tech or LSE and Imperial. After 1968 there was a deliberate effort to make that irrelevant. Now there are good departments and there are better and worse universities but the range is so small that which university you went to isn’t worth mentioning. Germany is still a research powerhouse but it’s all about different branches of the Max Planck Institute, not universities.
You think the US can deliberately reduce the funding and prestige of universities like that? They don’t even have a federal education system.
My personal experience: I went to a public University in my country. My parents paid around $800 per year (I had a 50% discount, because I have 3 younger siblings). I don't know how high it's ranked. It is honestly not something people ask. Most public schools are simply good enough.
We have some private schools, but a lot of students end up there because they don't want to put a lot of effort so their daddies pay them a title. And since the schools don't want to lose them they give them a pass, or dumb subjects down. So a lot of private schools are worse (in the sense that they require less effort) than public ones. To the point where some job offers started including the clause: "Any Student with the so-and-so degree, except those from this Particular Private School".