DoctorAllcome - I am in the US and my DCs are currently navigating or have recently navigated the world of student loans and finaid. Four of five have managed to get excellent financial aid, whether at private or public universities.
Thanks to the US university approach, they all spent time toiling in core coursework before focusing on their majors. The UK arts/STEM divide isn't a thing in rigorous American universities.
Despite my advice to my DCs to get a degree that would pave the path for a paying career immediately upon graduation, one recently committed to a loan that will come to approx $375k over four years of medical school, which is a sobering - actually staggering - thought. Med students can opt to commit to military service (if the military will take them) and have tuition and board paid in return for active service years equal to the number of years in med school, but then their choice of residency is at the military's discretion. After much soul searching, DS decided that loans were preferable.
www.nerdwallet.com/best/loans/student-loans/medical-school-loans This is the situation he was looking at for loans. He will have to take out insurance to guarantee the money will be repaid regardless of untimely retirement or death.
It's interesting to note that some public land-grant universities have begun to look at the possibilities of offering free tuition to students in certain income brackets. NY is one well publicised case of a public university attempting to become affordable and attractive to well qualified students, but my own sate of Illinois is also jumping aboard the bandwagon. The land grant universities obv benefited from the view of higher education as a public good and public universities obv receive funding paid for by the taxes of all state residents, so it is refreshing to see the germ of a realisation that there should be a quid pro quo, a chance offered to in-state students.
Part of the motivation for both the IL and NY initiatives is knowing that well qualified students were getting better deals elsewhere. www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-illinois-students-public-universities-20180824-story.html
Two of my DCs went to private universities that offered excellent finaid. There are approximately 66 private universities in the US that admit on a need blind basis and offer to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need of admitted students on a sliding scale up to $150k annual family income. By contrast, the U of IL had a reputation for being expensive and its degrees in many subjects less prestigious. If the two DCs who went private had opted to do engineering I would have cheered them off to the U of IL without a moment's hesitation.
One of the ways for a public university to guarantee a steady income from tuition and fees is to try to attract foreign students who pay the full whack and out of state students who also pay higher tuition and r&b, when initiatives such as those contemplated by Illinois are undertaken. American universities are attractive primarily to STEM students from abroad. Very few American arts/humanities students will be lured out of state to a state university that is more expensive than their own state U, esp to a place with brutal winters and no skiing, so R&D money from the National Science Foundation is extremely important. Schools pull out all the stops to attract talent in science and engineering.
Developing the endowment has to be taken seriously too. I get mail from three universities regularly, and phone calls every three months during funding drives. They are wasting their time and stamps in my case. Wooing big donors is the name of the game, but every little bit helps, and fundraising/institutional advancement is done very professionally in the US, even in private elementary schools. Only Oxbridge has anything like the endowment levels of US universities. UK university provision was expanded but funding it was a little detail that was neglected.
You can't shop around for institutional financing as much in the UK as some can in the US, which is a pity, because some degrees from some institutions are not going to result in increased income prospects.
Even so, US students who have good but not spectacular grades and whose family income places them in the squeezed middle - students who won't get merit based scholarships and who won't qualify for much financial aid - find themselves faced with very difficult choices. The problems of astronomical student loans that will never be paid off on middling salaries, that prevent people from committing to buying a home or even keeping a dog, let alone planning to have a child, are well documented.
I don't think you can really say that the US system creates success if you mean success across the board. Some people succeed. Others have bitter regrets about taking out big loans to go to Mediocre U, unless they managed to choose a major that turned out to be a really good choice, but many emerge with degrees that will never be a foundation for a career. The big winners in the US system are the de Vos family of course.