It's funny, because in most other first world countries, it is the responsibility of the government to provide higher education to its citizens. Perhaps you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or "pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps", but not all of us are so lucky to have thousands of dollars to put toward education.
On the other hand there is an enormous concentration of globally preeminent higher education institutions (Stanford, MIT, Harvard and the other 7 Ivy League schools, UChicago, Duke etc) in the one first world country where the national-level government doesn't consider higher education among its responsibilities.
(*insert caveat that it's hard to really compare national governments when a single US state can have a larger population to manage than an entire European country)
