The entire US university system is a joke. $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. Hundreds of universities who rely on foreigners who come to the US for studies for their survival. And most of these foreigners are only coming because they want to immigrate and student visa is an easy entry ticket.
Keep in mind that in many European countries, even if college is free, not everyone gets to go to it. In Germany, students are heavily segmented into tracks from an early point in their academic career, and if you're not in the traditional "college" track, tough luck: it's very difficult to get moved.
Honestly I don't know whether or not that's a better system. Whether students come out with a degree or a trade, they don't come out with debt. It's trading a degree of social mobility for economic gains, but in the US you can find yourself left out of either choice.
As for cost, $40,000 is the typical private school. Absent the top tiers, there's no reason to pay that price over a public University, where tuition in most states hovers around $10k per year. And if you do 2 years of community college first and finish up at a 4 year school, you can cut the average cost per year down to something like $7k.
Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices. Choosing the massive debt of a private school, or paying and extra $12k per year to live in a dorm "for the experience". That's how you run up $100,000 in debt before you even get a job. Don't have the money without taking out loans? Stay local, commute, find friends that live on campus and crash at their rooms every once in a while. College is expensive partly because our society treats it as a right of passage rather than an educational experience.
> paying and extra $12k per year to live in a dorm "for the experience"
This is disingenuous, as there are many universities that do require first year students to be on campus, with limited exceptions.
> Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices.
Sure, but the impression most families and arguably American society at large have (which is a mix of truth, "belief", and maybe self fulfilling prophecy) is that the more prestigious schools, which also tend to be private, will land you a better job by virtue of the name or networking. It's harder to turn down an opportunity with that in mind, especially as student debt is hard to really grasp the magnitude of as an 18 year old never having dealt with that much money.
There's a state college in almost every city that you can commute to. It's not disingenuous to talk about forking an extra $12k a year "for the experience".
> Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices.
I am not sure families are the ones to blame here. Astronomical tuition and loan interests that cannot be forgotten in bankruptcy is a predatory combo.
In the European countries you mention no student start their professional like with $50k-100k in unforgivable debt.
Parents and their children choose these astronomical loans when there are much more affordable options. Every student coming out of a mediocre private school with $120,000 in debt could have received the same education for less than a third of that. They're absolutely sharing a large portion of blame when they make that choice.
What? A predatory system isn't predatory because poor, uneducated people should make better decisions? That is exactly why the European systems don't have gotchas.
The US system sells dreams that don't come true, and you blame them for believing that they can do better in their life than their parents by getting an education? Absurd.
The gotcha in the German university system is studying 4-5 years and then dropping out without degree, because there is very little support and a culture of expecting knowledge and not teaching knowledge, which hits underclass students the hardest.
> In Germany, students are heavily segmented into tracks from an early point in their academic career, and if you're not in the traditional "college" track, tough luck: it's very difficult to get moved.
I heard the last part is changing thanks to "Gesamtschulen" (schools with all 3 tracks and a way to switch after you finish your track).
But anyway, it’s not as if that’s the only way. Vocational training is another way to go to college.
Not just the west, plenty of states in the country have excellent public universities that are extremely affordable, and even more so when you go to community college for the first two years. I graduated with a degree in computer science from a pretty good state school a for around 14 grand in debt. My wife has 3 degrees and has no debt now. My student loan payments were 200 dollars a month, pretty affordable.
"Pedigree", and other terms used to refer to the same concept, are nothing more than the reflection of the track record of an institution regarding scientific quality and training.
"Pedigree" also reflects a pre-screening of candidates with regards to academic and technical potential.
It might be true that I won't become the next Niels Bohr if I attend the same universities he attended or lectured in, but let's not fool ourselves into assuming that you'll learn the same from a course taught by amateur underperforming lecturers than what you would from a course taught by nobel laureates to a room of top-performers.
I don't think the quality of the lecturers matters that much. It's all about the students for me: good students create an environment and expectations that drive the whole thing. An excellent teacher isn't going to drag average students to amazing, but conversely a decidedly average teacher will not make amazing students average.
Also, I am not convinced your average Nobel laureates is a particularly good teacher. If anything, from experience, research focused professors often see teaching as a chore and it has a clear impact on the quality of their teaching. If we're talking about teaching calculus 101, I'd much rather have a no-name professor who is a good pedagogue and loves teaching than a Fields medal winner.
Of course, in reality, the fact you were taught by $famous professor is probably more valuable than what you actually learned in the class.
> than what you would from a course taught by nobel laureates to a room of top-performers
Do you really think you're getting a full course taught by a Nobel Laureate? Do you really think the room is full of top-performers? Sure, the average might be better than a state college, but not much better (with some exceptions, surely)
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe.
It helps to recall that taxes pay for this 'free' service. American tuition has risen pretty much in lock step with state funding cuts, which itself is often motivated by a combination of partisan politics, constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, federally prohibited bankruptcies, and negative economic shocks.
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe.
If you pay $40k a year in the US and think that you are paying for an education, then, yes, you will be disappointed.
For schools at that price point, you are paying for the network. Whether the network delivers or not is a different issue — sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very context-specific.
Without the university system we'd just be Saudi Arabia though.
It's just a matter of time until we nationalize everything and finally get a modern system. It's inevitable, the US university system just isn't competitive anymore for actual US citizens.
State schools provide adequate education and are affordable. I hope the same people who introduced federal student loans don't decide to nationalize the education system because the former was an absolute disaster.
If the European university systems are so great, why are their results so horrible?
Where's the great wealth, economic growth, high productivity, and high incomes? The majority of Europe is languishing very badly and it's getting worse by the year.
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe.
It's not free at all, and everyone knows it's not free.
Let's see you do the final tally, which includes income across a lifetime vs tax rates.
Europeans pay epic taxes in part for that 'free' college. The US middle class pays very low taxes by comparison. That has to be factored into the equation.
The US middle class is richer than the middle class in: Sweden, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Greece, Poland and Czechia among numerous others.
The US median wealth figure is comparable to Norway.
I think it's important to restate that: the US middle class is richer than the middle class in Sweden, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark - you know, just four of the supposedly best off nations in world history.
So where are the great results for that non-free education?
I would much rather pay an equivalent amount for university (and healthcare and so on) through taxes rather than through debt. Having debt introduces risk and makes me fragile in a way that taxes just don't.
What if you get in a bad car accident? Your kids have to go to university, right? Oh, and any decent public school comes with an equivalent tax burden. What about public transit? Also no access to cheap, fresh food... something that these "undeveloped" countries all have. The list goes on...
A middle class Dutchman is way better off than a middle class American. I am so glad I left the USA for the promised land.
