How much does a year of public university cost in Spain?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the private American figure from this site and apply the ratio the explanation gives: around three percent of it. Public university fees here are capped by regional government and heavily subsidised, so the price is a policy decision rather than a market outcome.

That thirty-fold gap is the point of asking. Two wealthy countries with comparable universities charge students amounts that differ by a factor of thirty, which means the cost of educating a student is not what determines the price — the decision about who pays is.

The regional variation is the local complication: fees differ meaningfully between autonomous communities, because each sets its own cap. A national figure here is an average across seventeen separate pricing decisions, which is a smaller spread than the American one but not a single number either.