America is now a second-tier country
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Edit: While there is much more to the city than the eastside, here is a neat HBO documentary about the drugs & violence in eastside KC in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wbt16OevZc
From a policy perspective that kind of long term debt comes with stress, health problems, productivity problems, social mobility problems.
Peoples ambition (and in some cases sense of entitlement) comes from their upbringing; if you add long term debt to that aswell you end up in a situation where even more careers are decided by childhood circumstance, rather than potential.
I don't see how this could be stressful even if I continue paying some small amount into my 50s - from my point of view it's not debt, it's more like paying a water bill each month.
For example; a starter salary of £28k would be only £7k over the threshold and "only" result in repaying 9% of that, or £630 per year. But in Austerity Britain people on that kind of salary (e.g. nurses) are already starting to resort to using food banks.
Weigh up the alternatives, such as an apprenticeship or a job offer and university starts to lose ground to other options; but much more so for people with a lower socio-economic background. This is the problem.
Some people will look at the associated debt issues and decide it's not worth it (open question as to what percentage). Often this will be in comparison to a job offer or apprenticeship.
There will also be people who don't look at the issues directly, but instead rely on the guidance of older generations, and perhaps contrast things like living costs.
These decisions are made differently based on socio-economic status. That's the access issue.
I don't have objective data but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence around of people from lower-income backgrounds making choices because of their background not because of their ability.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/aug/17/teenagers-...
For comparison, Denmark lists 0.95 years, UK lists 0.96 years.
PhDs and masters are also absolutely monstrously long in the United States - often literally twice or three times as long as in Europe. Fewer people do those of course but maybe that also adds up to a higher average.
In places like the UK you normally go from zero degrees to PhD in six years, while in the United States you could conceivably only just be fishing your masters work at that point.
Mind you this was in an engineering department in the late 80s and early 90s - things have no doubt changed :-)
As another extreme, I have a colleague who completed a PhD with very strong research results in Austria in just two years.
I'm from Austria and we switched to the bachelor master thing just briefly before I started to study. Before we usually had 5 years diploma studies and a doctorate with at least 3 years.
Another interesting difference is probably that our studies tend to be completely specialized. So when I studied CS I did only that. If you're interested in history or whatever you just study that in parallel - no tuition and for long we also had no access restrictions - you basically just went there and said you want to study X. 10 minutes later you were enrolled.
Not sure how one would measure "access" though, does that mean counting people who could have reasonably gone to college but didn't?
If you consider the total cost of attendance including room, board, books, and other costs, the estimates for the most expensive schools peak either at $68--72k/year at Columbia or ~$70k/year at Harvey Mudd, followed by at least 40 other schools over $65k/year.
The most expensive in-state tuition at a public college is $16--17k/year. The most expensive (in-state) total cost of attendance are a few schools (like NJIT, William&Mary, and some UC campuses) in the $30--34k/year range.
I'm in the Netherlands. 1600€/ year for a bachelor's and master's degree in theoretical chemistry, 5 years full time.
Also, semi related, doing a PhD afterwards for 4 years paid me a ~1800€/month salary.
I'm pretty happy with my local circumstances.
we have horrible highschools compared to Europe and Urban China
We do have good higher education but with the following caveats
1. 500% increase in tuition relative to inflation
2. Global competition for entrance rates as people from all countries want access to American universities
I wouldnt elite view American colleges as American institutions of higher education. Just ones that reside in America, but that does not mean that Americans are the ones excelling and going into them, going to grad school, starting wealthy companies and creating jobs in America.
edit* I removed the statement about saying America versus North America.
> American colleges
> American institutions
> reside in America
> Americans
> jobs in America
[NB Total cost of going to a top private school in the UK is probably at least $50K a year]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
What the rest of the world calls public schools are usually called state schools.
It's just us being quirky. It's not intended as a deliberate attempt to confuse and confound non-natives. Honest guvnor.
I went to a public urban highschool for the first two years of highschool, then a scholarship for a private highschool where tuition is $40k/yr.
So in that regard, I would say its comparable that America also has a range of top tier private schools, and then both high end and low end public schools, with the high end ones residing in rich suburbias.
Also, I think there is some slight flip of how public and private schools are referred to in the UK vs US, and that might directly conflate the comparisons we are making in our heads? Is it not the reverse in the UK, where a private school is actually the default district school and the public is a school with tuition? I feel like I remember being confused about this previously in my life with a UK person. Maybe that is also the source of confusion.
It means pedants like to pretend that the world hasn't been using "America" to refer to the United States for decades, and they act like it isn't well established vernacular.
Education: 2,000 EUR/year vs. 20,000 - 30,000 USD/year (this goes up to 60,000 USD/year in case of Stanford, Harvard, etc.)
I cannot find enything that would make an easy comparison possible on healthcare.
Not really. Basically anybody can (or at least could) get loans to go to university. Much harder to get a loan for a medical procedure
A strong counter-argument would be economy of scale (in education, healthcare, defense...) for example.
It's unlikely that as a country grows, the optimal class size increases or that a doctor is somehow able to treat a patient nx times faster than in a smaller country. Doesn't make sense on the most basic level.
Defense does...sort of, but the US DoD is such a unique and unprecedented beast in human history that it's hard to make hard conclusions about it with n=1.
a caveat to healthcare is that medical R&D probably does have economies of scale, but not routine treatments and healthcare.
To measure the "wellness" of a country's population, they took stuff as health, education, etc.
What would you choose?
Anybody who would make a trip from Vienna to Graz and, say, Aspang am Wechsel and then would make a similar trip between London, Birmingham and, say, Battle in East Sussex would see very, very, very different levels of social development is just about any regard.
Why being picky? Because referring to, say, Europe as a unity is questionable and definitely is, were you to intend Scandinavia.
over bringing in the best and brightest while simultaneously making higher education affordable for americans and bolstering our public school system which is one of the worst in the world, the quality of which is entirely dependent on the average income of the neighborhood your parents live in.
The scariest part about having a reduced credit rating and falling into descent while having a sexist American for President is that most of the internal (I'm a United States citizen) banter I hear is the grumbling of Americans blaming our falling status on everyone else.
We have horrible schools
We are lazy on average in comparison to other higher educated European countries when it comes to educating ourselves
We supposedly hate CNN/Fox news but people watch it.
While I would not say the HN population is like this, the majority of suburban America is xenophobic even in the Northeast where people like to brag about being better than the South (I grew up in the deep South, went to college in NY and now live out West)
The north and the south are still deeply divided and it reflects the long standing habit of thought in this country is that we are deeply divided and unwilling to accept blame for our actions.
Our political system is a rock throwing party to see who is still alive and standing at the end.
We are second-tier country. I'll be impressed to see if we are one by the end of my lifetime.
The scapegoating along with the sense of entitlement so many Americans have along with the persistent ignorance and declaration that we are the best country in the world and that is a title that belongs to us forever while by every measurable metric we are not, borders along the narcissistic psychological disease of continual denial and mental evasion of the person who was voted to lead this country.
I am not denying that fact, but I am not sure how that correlation relates to the non existent correlation to America.
I'm open to more explanation