The high price of a free college education in Sweden
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
- University is free in Sweden.
- Sweden has a high cost of living.
- Young people in Southern Europe are more likely to live at home, though the cause of this isn't clear.
The title and start of this article sound like the author has some sort of agenda to promote, but there's so little substance that I still can't tell.
In the reverse, kids that didn't leave home after high school (and seemed ill prepared for the shock of the real world) seemed to have children much younger, often while or shortly after attending community college, living with their parents or just down the street.
My experience is highly anecdotal (and maybe stereotype-enforcing) and I would think that it differs depending on where you're from as well (I'm from the Northeast). But it's rather the opposite of this take-away.
Those things aren't free in places where there is college tuition either.
Its common here in the US to have a part time job to pay for your expenses. Is it not the case in sweden?
Time management is key.
As someone who hires their own interns and Jr eningeers, it's shocking how few applicants have ANY prior work experience.
I had a 15-20hr/wk internship, and worked retail on weekends.
However, I often turned in homework that only outlined the knowns, unknowns, drew a diagram, listed equations that were applicable, and that was it. 50% credit for 30min of work.
That speaks more for the simplicity of the courses of your university more than against my position. Are you really Swedish? I'm going to assume not. Engineering classes at Swedish universities typically don't give points that add up to a grade cutoff point. You might get an average grade of all projects and finals. The final exam is typically 5 hours long with 5-10 very difficult questions. In my CS program we had to work 60+ hours minimum a week, and classes often had 70%+ failure rates. This is not an environment where you can get a second job, and to my knowledge, none of my classmates or anyone I knew did so, except during summers.
It spoke for the grading structure of the homework and did not apply to all courses.
Exams and projects were graded much more rigorously and there was a similar drop out/fail rate as you describe.
Not all engineering courses required homework for a grade. Often homework was only worth 5%, exams and projects the remainder. However, weekly problem sets easily consumed 10-15hrs per course, 3-4 courses per quarter.
Professors left it to the student to prove their understanding of coursework through exams. I often suspected due to the high rate of plagerism on homework (copying peers or access to solution guides).
Edit: don't get me wrong, I never had free time as a student. Every free moment outside of class was consumed by studying, working, eating or sleeping. I occasionally skipped lectures to buy free time.
It all came down to risk assessment which is a valuable skill to be learned for industry.
Time management I learned in school has paid off tremendously in my career and is something I seek more than a minimum GPA threshold in my interns and Jr. Eng's.
EDIT: I should add that a lot of this was by necessity because of American college costs...but I look at it as a long term benefit for me personally.
I paid my tuition almost entirely through co-ops (6th month internships) and then worked while in school to pay my day to day bills. I was also very lucky to have a safety net from my parents if I needed it, although I didn't.
As an example: in the engineering programs of KTH, typically half of the students don't make it through the first year. Many classes has a 70%+ failure rate.
It's not particularly common, no. You might work a month or two during the summer breaks, perhaps.
As mentioned, tuition itself is free, but students still need to pay basic living costs. In order to allow students to focus on their studies, students receive financial aid towards these costs while studying. Pretty much everybody is covered for this aid. Part of it is "free" (i.e., a grant that you get every month, which you do not need to pay back), and a second part is a loan, which needs to be payed back later. You can choose yourself whether you'd like to avail of the "loan" part, and for how much (up to an upper limit). The loan has pretty good terms; you have several decades to pay it off (if you wish to take that long), at low interest rates (it used to be ~2% a few years ago, and is currently 0.6%).
This is available for non-Swedish citizens studying in Sweden as well, I believe.
There's a bit more information at http://www.csn.se/en/2.1034/2.1036/2.1037/2.1038/1.9267
Compared to US students, though, they're doing great.
2. The fact that college is labeled as "free", for the end consumer, makes making bad decisions easier. So, you will see a lot of dumb people who are bad at math, physics, computer science, chemistry, trades etc. going to these "free" colleges to study some worthless bullcrap like sociology, psychology, journalism, economics, gender studies, philosophy etc. That way, they will waste a lot of tax dollars and what do taxpayers get in return? Nothing. They get arrogant and entitled dummies who might become socialists/communists/feminists/feel_the_bern and bitch about nonsense and how the world is unfair, when in fact they are the parasites. You'll see some of them becoming 'diversity officers' or government bureaucrats sucking even more tax dollars.
I guess nordic coutries just consider that most people are good enough for high education and high education should be able to teach all these people. And nordic countries tend to ace it; they are at the top of all the "human capital quality" ratings.
But anthropology, how is that not a solid field? It has a clear cut topic, it has ongoing discussions and has brought us evidence backed up theory's like evolution.
The irony is none the less, that something like a john doe who majored in sociology blogging about the basic income might be more useful in the long run then a john doe working in a steel mill, waiting for a robot to replace him.
Disclaimer: Im in robotics, but ventured into a lot of other fields out of pure interest. TL,DR - Conclusion: If it feels right - its usually wrong, or has a thousand edge cases.
I think about my fellow people the way I think about immigration... neither inherently good nor inherently bad for a society. If an immigrant is a brilliant physicist, it's a plus, whereas if an immigrant is a drug lord, it's a minus.
I'd rather live in a society surrounded by educated people, even if some of them choose a flakey major, or don't agree with all my views. That the people who get a "free education" also benefit from it themselves is just an added bonus.
What is the use in assuming that anyone who has come to a conclusion other than your own has had the wool pulled over their eyes? No self-respecting Swede believes that university is 'free' in the sense you mean it; the costs are palpable to all taxpayers. The argument in favor of 'free' higher education—that is, education for which the costs are borne collectively, rather than by individual students who are presumed not to have funding to match their abilities—typically runs that a better and more widely educated country is a more productive country, and that students of higher education will as a body more than pay back the money given them in the form of schooling. What's more, they will pay their costs forward, offering the same opportunities for succeeding generations.
You argue against this belief, after misrepresenting its proponents as people 'tricked' into thinking that no money has changed hands. That showed poor faith—something that is discouraged on this site—but, I'll move on. You insist that students given a leg up are more likely to squander their chances and to become parasitic, taking more than they put in. But you've given absolutely no evidence for this. Your 'reality check' is nothing more than supposition. Please direct us to numbers that indicate that Swedes are more likely to take degrees which you deem 'worthless,' and less likely to take STEM degrees or study a trade, than countries without 'free' education. Perhaps compare these figures to the US (you're clearly American, as shown by your line about the fervor surrounding Bernie Sanders among Swedish undergraduates). The US has quite high post-secondary tuition, even at its public universities, so if you're right in your thinking there should be far fewer 'parasites' there.
On what grounds do you speak about the left-leaning faculty in the Swedish university system? I certainly have no first- or second-hand experience that I could counter your claims with, but I suspect you have none by which to make them.
In general, a system of 'free' education is at least intended to give each generation as clean a sheet as possible. People may be self-made, but their children are not. 'Free' education provides (better) opportunities for those willing to put in the effort and do the work, regardless of their parents' abilities to land them in a good situation. No system rewards work and only work absolutely; but this is one attempt to do so, and it behooves anyone who wants to engage in actual conversation (as, for instance, on an online forum) to address it as such.