Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

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Some of each of the above.

In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more

True for a lot of places. Last I heard you could get Harvard for free if your parents make less than some reasonably large amount ($70K or so)

US faculty receive massively higher salaries.

True, especially compared to the UK. There is in general a lot more money floating around the US university system to make life easier. My officemate recently moved from a postdoc position here at Big-Name American University to a lectureship at Mid-Ranked UK University and was bitching about how he lectures two and a half courses per semester (as opposed to the usual one course in the US) and has to do ridiculous things like taking out his own garbage because the university won't pay for cleaners.

In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay

Well if we're comparing to the UK, then the UK is if anything more concerned with the status conveyed by education. The British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school.

The main reason, in the end, is that the US is the only major country where the higher education system isn't primarily an arm of the government. Great private universities just don't exist in other countries. There are upsides and downsides to this -- the upside is that America has most of the best universities in the world (can you imagine if it didn't?) and the downside is that they can be pretty darn expensive.

"The British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school."

I've never seen people judging based on high school in the UK. Who, exactly, is doing this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College#University_admissi...

There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example.

But other than that, no one really.

>There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example.

That exists here in America too. Harvard and Yale account for quite a lot of our top executive and judicial branch posts. Most famously, every one of the 9 members of the Supreme Court is either from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School. In their own way, Harvard and Yale are America's Eton - where future leaders go to hobnob with other future leaders.

Yes, but Harvard and Yale are higher education institutions whereas Eton is a secondary education institution. That was hugh3's point: "the British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school."

I want to say the English equivalent of America's Ivy League universities like Harvard and Yale are its older private universities like Oxford and Cambridge, but the truth is the reverse (Oxford, for example, dates back to about the 9th century!)

Our Eton would be Andover.

They're called public schools in England because free and tax-funded education is a relatively new phenomenon. At a time when people could choose between private tuition at home and religious tuition in classrooms, public schools offered a classroom education to any fee-paying member of the public, regardless of creed.

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