SoFi Blog

Concerns about the rising cost of college in the United States—and the $1.4 trillion in student loan debt nationwide—are alive and well.

And they’ve prompted a lot of discussion about the different ways our educational peers nearby, across the pond, and beyond handle student loan repayment programs. When it comes to tuition costs and paying off student loans, the American system is unique—and not for all the reasons you might think.

It turns out that cheap or even free tuition doesn’t mean the end of student loans. Student loans are common even in countries with free tuition, because no matter where you go to college, you have to live somewhere and, of course, eat.

Sweden gets a lot of attention because tuition there is free. Still, Swedish students borrow money for college just as frequently as Americans do—and about 70% of students in both countries have student loans. But Swedish students graduate with about $20,000 in debt, compared to about $30,000 for American graduates.

To explore how the rest of the world pays for learning, we looked at the most recent QS World University Rankings. Thirty-two of the top 100 schools are in the U.S. Another 32 are found in just four countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Canada. Below, we compare the way higher education is financed in all five nations, in descending rank order.

In our latest member spotlight, we catch up with travel nurse Sophia Khawly and learn more about her adventurous career path. Sophia not only travels the world through her work in healthcare (jealous!), but was also able to conquer $52K in nursing school debt after refinancing with SoFi.

Law careers are traditionally viewed as lucrative and enviable. Yet, many attorneys are saddled with mortgage-sized law school debt after graduation.

About five years ago, Harvard Law School left one law school grad and blogger, DebtFreeJD, with nearly $150,000 in student loan debt. After a few years of payments, she’d made a $25,000 dent in that total. Then, she and her husband made an ambitious vow to tackle her remaining law school debt in one year and two months—about the same amount of time it took to build the Empire State Building. Today, thanks to diligence and a refinance, she has earned her DebtFreeJD moniker.

When choosing a law school, your decision is most certainly based on the prestige of the faculty, the academic qualifications of the student body, and the institution’s success in placing graduates in satisfying careers. But what about the big money unknowns—the salary you’re likely to earn upon graduation and how much of your rookie attorney paycheck will go toward paying for your education?

To help take some of the guesswork out of your legal education strategy, we analyzed more than 60,000 student loan refinancing applications submitted to us from January 2014 to December 2016 to formulate SoFi’s Return on Education (ROED) Law School Rankings. After taking a long, hard look at the average salary and student debt load of law school graduates three years out of school, we compiled objective data that can’t be found anywhere else—verified income and debt, not just reported figures. The result: Rankings of how the top (and bottom) JD programs stack up when it comes to how your financial future will fare.