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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

And yet in much of Europe (or at least where I'm from), colleges where you pay tuition are considered substandard whereas colleges without tuition are considered high quality.

Mostly to do with the expectation that if you pay tuition they will make bloody certain you get that degree, whereas colleges without tuition fail some 50% of their students.

Hell, Universities don't even want to accept tuition-based colleges under their umbrella because the quality just isn't there.

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Same with Japan. The national universities are much cheaper than private universities, and are held in much higher regard.

#1~6 are all national universities, and 8 out of the top 10 are national.

http://www.uscollegeranking.org/japan/top-japanese-universit...

This is an interesting difference to bring up. I would trace the push for high graduation rates in the US to its inclusion as a parameter in the canonical US News college ranking equations. The oft-stated reasoning is that a top-flight college that allows even 10% of its students to leave without a degree in 5-years is failing them somehow.

To some extent, this is true -- I have personally seen brilliant friends drop out of a stressful college when clearly the university was not serving their reasonable needs.

This just seems bizarre to me. How can state funded schools compete for good professors with rich private schools?

Professors in state funded schools get enough free time to run businesses on the side. They also get access to grant money. Also there's the prestige involved with being part of a University with 100+ years of tradition versus a college with 20 years of tradition at best.

In Germany the "rich" private schools are almost exclusively business schools. So it's only an option for you, if you're a professor of economics or finance, not if you're a physicist or a philosopher.

Well, I think there is one highly esteemed journalism school (not a university, but run by large media companies) and a pretty good law school.

(Interestingly enough all those "rich" private business schools here fail after a few years because they run out of money -- not without taking quite a bit of taxpayer's money trying to save them.)

The private schools don't care about having good academics, just about making money. Good professors want to be associated with the trusted and traditional publicly funded universities.

Excactly, "clients" would complain if getting a degree was too hard.

Nobody becomes a professor for the money.

Except those who want money and see being a professor as the means and not the purpose.

And those are usually VERY bad professors.

I didn't become a software engineer for the money, either. But if someone offered me twice the money to do the same thing, I'd move.

Sure, but it's not clear you'd be doing exactly the same thing. I imagine teaching in an institution that's trying to retain its students so that they can suck more money out of them vs teaching in an institution that has that as less of a concern could be quite different.

Same here in Poland. Only the free universities are the good ones. Any paid-for private university is immediately considered worse and is very unlikely to result in a good job. All top 100 universities in the country are completely free.

And like the commenter above said - private universities will push through 90% of their students, so the degrees they get are worth close to nothing,no matter how much they paid. Meanwhile, the most prestigious schools in the country lose over 50% of the students in the first year because requirements are so high,and because they are not afraid of letting people go(they are not paying, so they are not entitled to anything). Out of 200 people signing up for an engineering course,only 20-30 people will actually graduate(and those engineers are sought after by every company in the country,because they are guaranteed to be good).

oh you must be joking, i'm graduating from top1 polish university and even the professors are saying the quality of education is piss poor -but well whan can you expect when the TA's are getting paid around 1500 zloty (500$) and the professors are grabbing ~4000zloty (a bit more than 1000$). But there are parts in which you are right - the graduation rate is 30% and the quality of education in paid unis is even worse. And no we're not sought after in the country because we tend to leave it.

The problem with leaving the country is that your very good degree is now almost worthless. I got mine (from a good technical uni) issued in English, I even wrote my thesis in English. Not a single employer wanted to look at it. Yet, I earn the same as my colleague with a PhD from a local uni. Turns out no one cares about degrees in software engineering. Maybe it's different in your industry.

Software engineering is probably one of the specialties better suited for an apprenticeship-style program rather than a degree-based one.

Yeah. I got my job in the games industry as an intern programmer before even graduating. When I finally did graduate, they were like "oh , cool", and that's it. I guess that even if I dropped out of uni they wouldn't care - I was doing my job and that's what was important.

Nah i'm in Computer Science aswell, although i'm planning to hit data science instead of software engineering. As for the degree i'm mostly doing it in case i'd like to go and do a PhD.

While free universities are the default and fairly good quality in Poland, your post has some mistakes:

- there's no top 100, since only 83 universities qualify to even be included in the ranking

- place 15 in 2013: Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego - not free

- place 43 in 2013: PJWSTK - not free, costs around $330 / semester

- It's not uncommon to fail exams at private universities, because you pay extra to retake them. Same as in "free" ones (they're only free as long as you don't fail anything, or don't want to continue)

source: http://www.perspektywy.pl/portal/index.php?option=com_conten...

Because, for one thing, the private schools aren't richer. And for another, the best teachers in advanced and specialized subject are academic researchers who prefer proven institutions over newer, profit-oriented institutions.

Running private schools is difficult, and I know of several cases where German private schools are causing all sorts of grief to paying students.

In Ireland, for instance, the rich third level institutions are the state ones; they get reasonable funding from the state, they have donations, they have intellectual property license fees, and so forth. The private ones are mostly targeted at people who can't get into their preferred course at a proper university (the private ones are normally not universities themselves), so they're smallish, and addressing a small market. In particular, they typically do no research.

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