Once they do, you’d owe them. Maybe not dollars, maybe a moral obligation, but they’d only give you something expecting a return

Most advanced countries will give you all of your formal education for free or with a heavily subsidized cost.

It usually don't create an obligation, or some kind of moral one. Managers have this joke (that for some reason they never think about) where they are deciding of they'll train their employees, and one asks "what if we train them and they leave?", so the other respond "what if we don't train them and they don't?". State payed education is just that, but at a society level, and for everything the society expects from people instead of just work.