How Europe Fails Its Young

John Uskglass said:
So....(lifts up pencil from clipboard a la Chinese-American scientist in Jurrasic Park) you are arguing that it's meaningless to have more educated, intellegent professors?
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No, I'm arguing that that doesn't have much to do with how well they are at teaching the young. Which is, supposedly, what universities are supposed to do.
I'm not arguing at all that Ivy League universities are good at research, they pay tons of money to get that, but that has nothing to do with the quality of education.

That's nice, but it leads to 'Stalinist' corruption and stagnation. Ideology is meaningless.
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Uh-huh. So, your entire country is based on nothing? No, 'we deserve to be free' and, 'land of the free'. And all that 'religion makes for good societies' (remember, religion is an ideology too) stuff you've been preaching to us for years is meaningless as well?

Congrats on the anecdotes! Now here are mine!

My grandfather grew up in a moderetly well off family of farmers. He was not only the first in his family to go to college, he went to George Washington law and started a very succesful firm.

A freind of mine is at Brown. Her father is a WWII vet (how that happened, I still have little idea), and works at a Powell's Book Store.

See? Through the miracles of student loans and scholarships, we get people from all walks of life and much, much better schools.
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Hey, I'm not saying that doesn't happen there, but it's common here. In fact, most of the people I know in uni are not high-class.
I doubt that';s something you can say for universities of the highest level in the USA.

Depends on the feild. In some areas the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne is better at some things then Harvard.

And besides. More is required of the student at Harvard then at, say, the University of Utah. It's logical.
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Yet they all get the exact same title and degree.

Forgive me for saying so, but I believe anyone would look better on Harvard, Cambridge or MIT then almost any school in Europe.
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Cambridge and Oxford come to mind.
But besides that, I wasn't talking about comparisons with the USA, I'm not arguing that Ivy League universities look good on a resumé, I'm saying that the differences in universities are much smaller in Europe.


Bradylama: The problem is that 'higher quality of education' isn't something you can really measure properly. The same is not true for research, and hence research is often used to measure quality of universities.
And yes, job prospects are a lot better when you graduate from an Ivy League university. But that is an effect of tradition, not necessarily of quality in recent years.
 
However, it's not just in the assumed education one receives from an Ivy League that improve your prospects, it's mostly the implied standards. Like I said before, Harvard has much higher standards for students than Florida State, which looks better on your resume.

While it may still be traditional, being accepted is an ends in itself, as it is neither easy, nor cheap to get in.
 
I go to the second biggest state school in Illinois. I would say a large majority of the students here have middle-class or higher parents by far. One of my roommates is black and grew up on the south side of Chicago and does not have a dad in the picture. He is going to school almost entirely on state and federal funding.

I would definitely say he is in the minority(pardon the pun). There are a large portion of minority freshman that come here, but an overwhelming majority of them fail out or leave. I mean like 80% or so, and no that is not an exaggeration. My roommate got in on some Chicago-based college program, and he is literally one of 5 people left from that program. His freshman class for that program was 527. They were all from Chicago public high schools.

At my school college seems to be available to a lot of people, but a piss-poor high school education seem to really hamstring them. My roommate really struggles with a lot of basic stuff like HS math and english. He is basically living semester to semester in terms of failing out of school. My english and math classes were a breeze my freshman and sophomore years, mainly because I had a stronger HS education. I'm graduating at the end of the school year, and he is definitely going to be here another two years because he failed so many math and english classes. We started the same year.

My dad teaches at a public high school that is predominately black and hispanic, and they are generally lower class families. The rate of graduates going to college is something like 8-10%. At my predominately white upper class HS it was like 99.9%. I think only 4 people didn't go to college, and 3 joined the military and one had a medical condition.

I think that better HS educations should really be the focus now, but what do I know?
 
Nope. Is UIC the second largest public college in the state? I read in a magazine that it was Northern Illinois, and it's pounded into us by the administration here all the time.

I'll amend my first sentence in my last post if I'm wrong.
 
Northern Illinois University in Dekalb. It's about 2 hours drive west of Chicago, out in the middle of nowhere.

Fun fact: Barbed wire was invented in Dekalb.
 
Y'know, I checked some sources.

Apparently, Belgian education (for one) beats American education in every field analysed.

Except for the money spent on each student. Which is kinda funny.
 
Because a country with a population of 10 million is instantly comparable to a country with a population of 300 million?
 
Kotario said:
Because a country with a population of 10 million is instantly comparable to a country with a population of 300 million?
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...

Isn't that exactly what we've been doing all along.

TWIST AND TURN!
 
Twist from what? My only other comment here was on the crime of translating Shakespeare to French.
 
Kotario said:
Twist from what? My only other comment here was on the crime of translating Shakespeare to French.
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Eheheheeh

But you still chose to point out the inconsistancy of such comparisons at the point were Belgium came out over the US, rather than at the point where the US is praised over all others. Y'see?
 
I fail to see how population size would have any such big effects on these statistics, considering how -for instance- Australia, with a significantly larger population, does score better than Belgium on several fields.

't Is all percentages.
 
Jebus said:
I fail to see how population size would have any such big effects on these statistics, considering how -for instance- Australia, with a significantly larger population, does score better than Belgium on several fields.

't Is all percentages.
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Well then, why don't we compare Colorado alone to Belgium? Then how would Belgium compare?

It's only fair to compare the core members of the EU to the US rather then individual nations.
 
Unless I am sorely mistaken, the US is a nation. This whole discussion was spurred over the comparison between American education and the education offered in European nations - I fail to see your problem. Granted, figures have not been provided for the EU as a whole - but that would be an incredibly different story. The situation, as you very well know, in the EU differs from the US situation substantially. The EU hasn't had time to bring it's more retarded new members - Poland springs to mind - up to Western European standard yet. Not that they would be neccesairily worse, of course - heck, there aren't even any figures on that.
 
Jebus, you simply know it's not fair. The US is a massive country, bigger then almost all of Europe combined in terms of population, economy and space. Comparing it to a state that's smaller then half of our individual state governments is silly. Might as well compare China to Luxemburg.
 
Seems to me that US is comparable to European countries only when numbers are in its favor.
 
Graz'zt said:
Seems to me that US is comparable to European countries only when numbers are in its favor.
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WTF? That's what Jebus is doing here, not the other way around. It's US v. EU, not US v. Individual European Nations.

Or, hey, I'll be generous: pre-expansion EU.
 
John Uskglass said:
The US is a massive country, bigger then almost all of Europe combined in terms of population, economy and space.
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What? No it ain't.

Sjeesh, it's funny how Americans always think their country occupies half of the world, houses half of the world's population, and constitutes half of the world's economy. It doesn't by a long shot.

Also, I still fail to see how, for instance, results on math appliance scores for graduated students has *anything* to do with population size. What, a country becomes dumber as it gets bigger?
 
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