And yet, America does much better at the high end of education than Australia does. I have known a few professors who tried working on Australia for their careers and were not very impressed by the infrastructure and opportunity of research, nor the general caliber of students in their classes. I'm not saying cheap education is not useful, but I don't think it is a panacea, and the issue is much more complex than it appears.
Australia was colonized quite a long while after the US was, and still only has 22m inhabitants. It'd be surprising to me if it weren't a few decades behind the US for another 10-20 years.
How much is the non resident tuition? How would you afford the living costs in a foreign country if you can't get a work visa? (It seems a lot of countries have severe work restrictions for students.) A poor US person might not even have enough money for the plane ticket. :/
