Meet Ellie

This is Ellie . She's 22 years old and lives in Stockholm, where she studies engineering and media technology at the Royal Institute of Technology. There's no tuition to pay for the five-year course of study. And because she is from Stockholm, Ellie was able to live at home with her parents for the first couple years of her university career.

"My parents told me, 'You are very stupid to move out because every month you save like 4,000 kroner,'" she said.

In a way, she's an outlier. Sweden population of roughly 9.1 million--smaller than Belgium's--is sprinkled pretty evenly over a geographic expanse greater than Germany's. So for many Swedes, living with mom and dad while attending school isn't an option.

But Ellie is also like most Swedish students, in that she's taken student aid from the Centrala Studiestödsnämnden, or CSN , the state-sponsored entity that distributes student aid in the form of grants and loans.

"Everyone takes the grants," she said. "Almost everyone takes the loan as well."

She's right. According to data collected by the OECD, despite nonexistent tuition costs, Sweden has a virtually 100% uptake rate on student aid. That's why Sweden is all by itself in the bottom right corner of this chart, although its Nordic neighbors are not far behind.

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Moving out

Swedes, like other Nordic Europeans, have an independent streak. They leave their parental homes earlier than almost all their southern neighbors.

One study found that just 2% of Swedish men lived with their parents after the age of 30. In Spain, a quarter of 30-year-old men still are shacking up with mom and dad; in Italy it was around 32%.

Nobody's exactly sure why this is. One of the more fascinating theories is that the differences in the strength of family ties in northern and southern Europe is a faint echo of invasions by the Roman Empire and Islamic caliphates in the Mediterranean region versus the Germanic-Nordic dominance in regions further north.

Or it could reflect the fact that back in the middle ages, young people in northern Europe were often sent out to work as servants outside the family home. Others simply argue that it's the economy, with low wages and high housing costs conspiring to keep southern Europeans living at home.

Whatever the reason, ideas about youthful independence are embedded in the system Sweden devised to pay for higher education. For example, whereas in the US parents are expected to help pay for the their children's college education, in Sweden parental income levels are just not part of the equation. Students are viewed as adults, responsible for their own finances. As a result "levels of student support are based on students' own income, rather than that of their parents," wrote analysts in a white paper on the system. Compare that to countries like Germany, where any aid from the state agency that doles it out, known as BAföG, is premised on parental income. In the US it's the same deal. In Sweden, the entire system is aimed at severing the financial link between parents and young adults.