Obviously, nothing is perfect.
Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiturientenquote_und_Studiena...
standardized testing is mostly a scam.
There are STRICT entrance requirement - basically tied to your Abitur or similar. This means big waitlists if you are not a top scoring (on Abitur). European systems DO have exams and they can be pretty high stakes for classes. There are lots of quotas - as should be obvious given the education is free.
"The remaining places not reserved for the aforementioned advanced quota groups are filled following the Abiturbestenquote, i.e. applicants with the best higher education entrance qualification grades, and Wartezeitquote, applicants with the highest amount of accumulated wait semesters. The admission criteria within the selection process of institutions of higher education (Auswahlverfahren der Hochschulen, AdH) are set by the universities and institutions themselves according to the respective state law and their own requirements. Therefore, the AdH is not an additional application and admission procedure, but only one of several quotas."
All programs have requirements, to take a STEM program you need to have calculus, physics and similar from high school. If you don't have it there's generally a system to study for a year to pass those courses, allowing you to change track.
The entrance is then essentially. (Checked my program)
1. 66% based on high school grades
2. 34% on a SAT/ACT like test.
The test is different though, no essays or other subjective stuff. It essentially has two parts both multiple choice, one testing language and one testing logic. Score is assigned by bell curve of all takers. Generally not as good predictor of student suitability as grades but allows people who just barely passed high school due to lack of motivation, issues at home and similar to still have a chance getting into their dream career if they are smart enough.
You can generally with really high motivation study for the test and raise your score a bit, not hugely though, and having that motivation is another predictor for success studying so works itself out.
There used to be public graduation rankings, but they are no more.
In some countries there is no exam at all.
I don't know which nations you're talking about, but I'm not certain that I'd call entrance exams in France "rigorous". But the entire system is different than in the US, so I guess maybe it's not comparable?
In any case, trying to get a perfect score on an SAT is way harder. Probably the whole reason an industry has popped up around increasing your score on the SAT/ACT/GRE/GMAT/MCAT etc etc etc.
This can be very selective or not at all depending on where you're going, there are totally different tracks so it really can't be discussed in general (Law, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Art, trades, etc...). All are basically free, except business schools that are always private and super expensive.
I think that's the main difference between the US, US always have gigantic college of 30000 students that cover everything, whereas France is rather fragmented.
that's just not quite true in all major European countries I have a direct experience with.
Can you name a SINGLE well known major university that does not have this and allows anyone a free education? I will post the requirements here. It is not open to all by any means - their are STRICT quotas.
Once you get used to picking out German morphemes, it’s not hard to make things out.
That seems fairly common everywhere. It seems pointless to me to give a university education to someone that’s illiterate.
Your acceptance depends very very significantly on your performance in high school - there are strict cutoffs based on how you did on your abitur, which in turn relates to a series of high stakes exams and earlier tracking in high school (europe has tracking already in high school where entire high schools are different track).
It's not get a high school diploma and go to university for free. To be a vet, a doctor, a lawyer etc - you basically need to track into these positions VERY early. The good news, they limit the number of graduates through these screenings so the jobs on the other end tend to pay pretty well.
A lot of the posters are claiming you get to go to top universities for free to study subjects that lead to good paying jobs without even taking standardized exams etc. This is totally false.
It's actually much easier for joe blow to become a lawyer in the US then in Europe - including going to law school - including the non ABA schools EVEN if they didn't do well in high school. It does cost money though and for many the jobs don't pay what they would expect or hope for.
Seriously, I wish people would name the top universities without cutoffs - they don't exist.
As another user pointed out, US universities are also restricted in the same manner. Perhaps you're attempting to describe a difference in how they would be perceived and thus perhaps politically digestable, but college admissions is extremely competitive in the United States as well.
The bar for entry has certainly lowered/widened, likely related to financial incentives being discussed in this post.
WHAT ?? Not. at. all.
I'm french and university is almost FREE (never more than 1000 euros a year and mostly around 300) for anyone with the A-level, at any age. Yeah of course there are exams like for any diploma in the entire world but there are not "super rigorous" especially at uni. There's only a "hard" exam in medecine, and normal "exams" every year (like in every program in the world) that are basically a joke for anyone qualified in these disciplines. If you want you can enroll in elite tracks, which are very hard, but they are almost free too (i paid 0 for the education, 200 a year for housing + around 60 euro per month of food).
Granted you have amphitheater with hundreds of people, but if you are motivated you'll get the education.
The most expensive school in frances are the high end economic school and some engineering school (not the best ones actually) and it's under 10k a year.
You have no idea of how much you get screwed in the US
Seriously - if you want to be a vet in the EU it is CRAZY competitive. You simply have no chance to get in unless you have top Abitur scores.
Everyone saying you just need a high school degree to get into a vet school or anything else is dreaming. Many of the high schools themselves are tiered schools.
Indeed, so people don’t spend a ton of time teaching that which won’t stick no matter what.
It’s absolutely possible to tier-up if you are so inclined, but generally that involves a lot of work on your part.
However, I liked more the atmosphere in University.
Also, most private eng schools are crap though they're quite expensive.
So it doesn't seem that tuition have an incidence on quality, at least in France.
Current-year tuition fees at Carleton range from $3500CAD/semester to $5800CAD/semester [1] for domestic students. The province foots the bill for over half, probably closer to three quarters based on the international student fees. It's gone up a little but it's hardly un-manageable. Both my brother and I graduated without debt by working during the summers, and both scholarships and bursaries are available to help cover the costs -- and loans via OSAP [2].
FWIW I did mean to type $3500 in my original post, which is probably now closer to $5000.
[1] https://admissions.carleton.ca/scholarships/domestic-costs/
[2] https://www.ontario.ca/page/osap-ontario-student-assistance-...
Not enough to still live there, apparently. Sounds like Canada is good in some respects but worse in others, like making good money in your chosen career. Every country has trade-offs, and the US’s is that a lot of safety nets aren’t there but the sky’s the limit for high achievers. Some people like it that way.
This is true of many issues the US faces that Europe has solved. Healthcare, education, income inequality, housing, transportation, gun violence...
Just go down down the list and it's easy to find "unsolvable American problems" that have solutions, and that we Americans are totally ignorant about or refuse to acknowledge, saying it "won't work for us".
I don't think there is a European standardisation on hard entrance exams and limited numbers.
With all the progress in civil rights, charging hefty intuition is the only way to go
That a given university is a non-profit tells you almost nothing about whether it functions like a state-funded school in a social democracy. Many are actually quite predatory in terms of saddling students with tuition, fees, unnecessary courses, etc.
Economic inequality is an important problem but it’s not the only problem. It’s okay to sometimes accumulate and deploy funds to other ends.
Universities don’t act like specific cost centers of governments, they act like governments.
We're not accepting uncritically that universities are private endeavors. We're accepting that some are and they should be allowed to continue to exist.
UNC Chapel Hill (what I assume you mean by North Carolina) costs students from the state $8,834 USD. Out-of-state tuition is $33,916. I would not call either number "shockingly expensive."
Michigan is $14,402 and $45,410. UVA is similar. Quite a bit more but still not anything shocking. Minnesota is similar but out-of-state tuition is just $23k.
[Edited to add: Some people have more than one child. Some of them have more than one child in college at the same time.]
I still don't consider it shockingly expensive - it's been the top value public university in the country for 18 years in a row.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article233110061.htm...
No wonder university is a privilege of the wealthy.
Let's assume that the average high school graduate is an outlier, some financial wizard or an uneducated but driven high-earner with the wisdom and ability to save an entire years' base income for a college fund before they're out the high school's door, giving them just around enough to pay for four years of tuition at a cheaper public university.
So let's assume they have some kind of neat free housing deal where they work the dorm cafeteria and get their meals free as well.
They would then also have to be one of the 33% of undergrads who actually complete a degree in 4 years in public universities to wrap this miracle up without debt.
This person doesn't exist. And yet, achieving a debt-free college education at a reasonable age has been possible in previous decades and continues to be possible in other nations.
Because that assumption doesn't exist, nor does this describe how universities work in the US.
That's how you end up with "Education" being the first cost element of the French budget (about 72 billions EUR per year) despite pretty poor academic results (that can be easily observed in the ever-decreasing level of the national exams). When government manages everything in one field, that field becomes mismanaged (trains: SNCF always in the red, the post office: ever increasing costs for users year after year, etc...)
And while your examples are also true, I would argue that it's actually normal for rail and post to be in the red. This is because their primary purpose is not to generate revenue for the state, but to provide a service to taxpayers. For example, unprofitable train routes have to be kept because they link remote areas to cities.
In fact, when private industry handles these type of public services, users tend to have poorer service and higher costs, because there is a natural monopoly.
For train service, take a look at the UK, where different companies "compete": service is worse than France at a higher cost.
La Poste has been a publicly traded company for about 10 years if memory serves. Service has been getting worse ever since.
According to E. D Hirsch in Why Knowledge Matters, the decline in French academic results is attributable to them adopting the individualistic USA model.
Where are you getting the information that the supposedly poor results are because schooling is publicly funded?
But yeah, the grandparent is right - the US's problem is non-dischargable loans which removed back pressure on schools to control cost.
Well, worthwhile for whom? Just because the student won't capture an extra $150k from his university education, doesn't mean he won't produce that or more to the rest of society.
Hmmm:
>Robert J. ZimmerUniversity of Chicago
>Total Compensation: $1,625,136Base Pay: $1,090,844Bonus Pay: $100,000Other Pay: $286,484
https://i.imgur.com/b7omZa4.png
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensatio...
That would probably work if the system was designed that way decades ago. But we’re already in a situation where “free money” is driving tuition costs sky-high. Taking the next step and just having the government cut a blank check for “operating expenses” to every university will just kick the whole thing into overdrive.
If universities in the US were responsible and could a) keep expenses under control and b) not cry like little children when whenever the state demands some belt-tightening, it could work. But that’s not the world we live in. Universities just keep spending more and more and keep hiring more and more administrators.
My favorite experience with this was when I was in school many years ago at a state university. The state government said that their share of the funding was decreasing by 2% the next year (FYI, state universities are funded by state governments to some degree, it’s not all tuition). Two freaking percent! Basically asking the school to cut back to where they were two or three years ago. Sounds like a relatively reasonable ask, don’t you think?
Oh, you should have seen the wailing and gnashing of teeth that generated. The school was claiming that there wasn’t any fat in their budget (ha), and immediately proposed cutting like 10% of all class sections in math, science, art, etc. Then they riled up the students enough to have them march to the capitol and demand the cuts be rolled back (to be fair though, doesn’t take much to get students to get interested in joining a protest).
Anyway, my point is that US universities only know grow, grow, grow and to top it off they all have a fetish for turning campuses into lavish, over-the-top affairs. Getting them to cut back on anything is next to impossible, and giving them a blank check to be paid for by taxpayers in perpetuity would be a disaster.
Because:
1) that's a true statement - private institutions are free to be for or not for profit and charge whatever they like.
2) public universities are already funded (in part) by the government and the problem exists there as well, just not to the same extent
I agree entirely with the OP that the source of the problem is in what I will refer to as the "financialization" of college. As OP mentioned, we saw the same thing with the housing bubble. We see it anywhere this type of "easy" money is offered because most people are not long term thinkers or don't fully grasp the details of the terms of the contract or the impact. Put simply, if you offer people money (even with interest attached) as a loan - especially when they are young and broke and want to pay for something expensive - they are going to take it.
The same thing happened with housing. People's incomes didn't magically do up. Rates went down and so the banks said "hey, we'll loan you more money now" and people did exactly what people do - most of them took out the most that the banks would offer them to buy the biggest houses they could afford. This drove up prices across the board.
The same thing has happened here. The actual cost of educating a person hasn't gone up dramatically. Faculty to student ratios are largely the same as well. Yes, the colleges added a bunch of non-teaching staff that increased cost, but they didn't actually need that money to function (in the beginning). They were just suddenly able to charge a lot more because the government guaranteed a bunch of loans to people who otherwise couldn't get them or at least could get them at reasonable rates. So now there was more money chasing after the same amount of services. Unsurprisingly prices went up (a lot). The colleges then spent money on building new dorms and offering all types of new programs and things. And they hired a lot of administrative staff. Now they need that money to function because they got bloated with all that easy money.
It's just the same process we see over and over. With the federal, state, and local budgets - it's not a tax problem, it's a spending problem. Similar story here. There is far too much bloat and debt within these universities. But it all started with the same shitty easy money crap that we've seen before. Same scam, different industry.
We gotta fix that too...
It's not unreasonable to charge tuition fees that are significant enough to make sure student will choose seriously and study diligently. I say that because it is certainly not always the case in countries where university is free...
It also makes sense to provide scholarship for deserving student who could not otherwise afford it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/tuition-at-public-universiti...
It is therefore not a question of affordability but a question of priority for most families. If they cannot set aside that much money it is, bluntly, because they chose to spend their money differently.
Edit: Apparently the average price paid for a new car in the US is $37k [2]... So basically the same as the average price of a 4 year degree in-state. People make their choice.
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-average-income-in-usa-fam...
[2] https://www.boston.com/cars/car-news/2019/06/09/average-new-...
The $76k figure is median across all US households, I’d be more interested in the median amongst those aged 25-45, which is basically the ages you’d be saving for university (and even then you have to take into account that your income at the start of that range is not going to be what it is at the end).
There are a few reasons why people would resist the idea of making all universities publicly funded. One of them is that Academic pursuit is now beholden to the state and its interests. In the current system, you can find funding for research in universities from both private and public investment. Also, when all funding is from the government, its bureaucratic nature tends to increase costs. Anyone that has worked with a government contract in the US probably understands how lucrative it can be because the government is not incentivized to reduce costs in a way a private entity would. Anyone that has worked in a department of the government when they have to spend the rest of their budget so it doesn't get reduced also understands this. Interaction with private entities that are incentivized to increase profits with what is basically an infinite money pit is dangerous (who then use said money to push for regulatory capture in congress), and you can see the effects of this in almost every aspect of the U.S. government.
It also further cements the idea that you must go to University in order to be eligible for any sort of job in the U.S. Jobs that traditionally only required a high school education or less now require a 4 year degree. This already is happening to an extent because it's an easy way to eliminate candidates, despite the fact that their profession may or may not require any sort of post-secondary education.
It also is a program that benefits and subsidizes people that either don't need it (wealthy upper class) or are already relatively advantaged in life (middle class). It would unlikely benefit the poor as much as you'd think, as there are still a lot of barriers to getting into higher education that the poor face that the middle and upper class simply don't. From the bottom up they have worse schooling and less opportunities. They may be under pressure to find a job immediately out of school (or drop out of high school) to support their family. The exceptions that can benefit from some program like this likely already can benefit from the current system of scholarships and grants to underprivileged students.
I would like to see a shift to something more similar to Canada where the distinction between college and university is clear. Academic and Vocational (but still professional) schooling being separate can be valuable and serve students with different learning styles better than the largely liberal arts education that universities in the U.S. provide. I'd also like to see some of this theoretical money that is funding tuition-free university towards improving educational opportunities from the bottom up in places that desperately need it. It doesn't matter if your postsecondary education is tuition-free if you can't make it to college.
If states want to find community college or something I wouldn't gripe too much, but universities are for advancing human knowledge. Don't hold them back.
Undergraduate degree as a social signal is a different problem to solve.
What you're talking about is just introduction to the concept of pricing. Each person has to determine for themselves what it's worth. It will be worth more to some than to others. Everything of economic value gets priced, even if it's socialized.
You can't escape the market. If you think you can get a better value at a cheaper school, or in a different country with socialized schools, go there. Some will let you attend their universities for free even if you're not a citizen. Meanwhile people from all over the world will continue to scramble to get into our top universities. Maybe you know something they don't.
All available data shows otherwise.
See how well this works out in France. Overcrowding, declining facilities, students that have no business in college continuing to go since they have nothing at stake. The top tier schools are still pretty good, but normal schools are a crowded mess.