So do you think that the US higher-ed system is inherently flawed also, with competition between high achievers (i.e. Harvard) and schools that anyone can get into? It's true that there are more resources associated with success, but doesn't that also incentivize people to work harder to end up in the higher bracket? I don't see the "Class-C" problem as necessarily a problem, so long as the person in "Class-C" has the opportunity to get back to Class-A by putting in the appropriate work.
My own feeling (having also observed higher ed in Europe and Asia and other places) is that the US system works better for cultivating high achievement, but less well at making sure that lower achievers maintain a certain level of quality. This means that there is more spread over the bell curve and less in the center. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to prefer more clustering in the center of the bell curve.
This is equally true for wealth acquisition, btw, with Europeans generally preferring not to have extremes (i.e. extremely high wage earners or extremely low wage earners).
>> So do you think that the US higher-ed system is inherently flawed also, with competition between high achievers (i.e. Harvard) and schools that anyone can get into?
Yes, I do think there's a flaw there too. But the paid schools' issue is more complicated because of the "private" money involved. "Private" in that, students are paying directly out of pocket rather than the taxes that go into public high-schools that's less visible to people. What I'd like to see there, is that people who go to the cheaper & less "high society" schools get a chance to take maybe 1 or 2 classes a year at the Havards/Stanfords/Yales/etc just to see what it's like on those campuses. No segregation either; there should not be any way to tell which students are exclusively attending Harvard/Stanford versus the ones on the "visitor" program unless the student him/herself chooses to disclose that info.
My own feeling (having also observed higher ed in Europe and Asia and other places) is that the US system works better for cultivating high achievement, but less well at making sure that lower achievers maintain a certain level of quality. This means that there is more spread over the bell curve and less in the center. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to prefer more clustering in the center of the bell curve.
This is equally true for wealth acquisition, btw, with Europeans generally preferring not to have extremes (i.e. extremely high wage earners or extremely low wage earners).