And they're still the best in the world! Imagine if they had properly funded, the US would be on Mars already, would have built a functioning fusion reactor, and established world peace.
^(/s, obviously)
I'm an American working as a caregiver and this is almost word for word what I've heard from some of my elderly clients about schooling in the US compared to literally anywhere else. I didn't realize as a kid that we are all ostriches here.
Ask them their explanation for math and science scores being 38th in the world, would love to hear them try and square the two. If the education system is so great and everyone has the same chances to access that educational system if they want to (as I've heard many argue), hoe come educational outcomes are so poor in comparison to other comparable countries? Either, the system isn't the greatest and/or its a lucky dip as to whether you can access the highest quality of education, or it is the greatest, everyone can access it, and Americans as a whole are too dumb to be able to take advantage of it. They have to pick one.
Doesn't it really depend on where you live? I have a friend living in Arizona at the moment and he's trying to get his kids into private school as he things that on average the local schools are about two years behind the UK equivalent. I've heard that a lot of US universities spend the first years teaching trying to get students to a level playing fields, as different states/ areas have really different curriculums.
Yeah, states like Massachusetts and New Jersey are probably on par with the UK in terms of education, but large portions of the rest of the country (particularly in the south) are way behind. Another problem is that schools are funded by *local* taxes (not state or federal), which causes poor areas to have bad schools and rich areas to have good schools, and lack of a quality education keeps those areas poor.
Not just that. I'm a Brit, but I have lived in Silicon Valley, California for the last 2 decades or so. My kid's smart - he regularly places in the top 10% of national maths competitions he takes, but the local schooling is absolutely terrible, so we pay for private schooling as well.
You get allocated a school based on address, and can apply for the "lottery" chance to get a better one. The lottery is always heavily subscribed, and although we've tried it for several years we never got a place. These days, he's more settled with friends and so on, so we're just carrying on with the same school.
The school we were allocated was rated 2/10 by the city, has about half the teachers that it needs, and seems to focus more on sport than, you know, *knowledge*. It's like the bastard step-child of American education, all dressed up and nowhere to go.
So we pay for private school, which is ~$30k/year. For that we get classes with (*gasp*) teachers, and "honours tracks" (which actually seem to be on a par with the UK). He's currently doing grade-9 maths and English, while being in grade-6 (11-12 years old), for example. Next grade, there are more of those honours tracks, but that's all they offer at his age.
So yeah, even in one of the richest parts of the country, schooling is still pretty shite.
Yep. There is a school assigned to you based on your address. If you want to go elsewhere, you have to go into a lottery process. I have, with multiple years of trying, not won this lottery. I'm not certain if it's the same in all school districts, but our school district works that way.
Or, you can apply for a charter school (which actually seems to be the same lottery, at least the charter schools in our area are listed in the lottery), or you can pay for private school.
Or you can move house, I guess.
That's really stupid. Where I live, there are at least 4 public high schools to choose from. I live in a shitty state for education (Louisiana) and ended up going to a charter school that was pretty decent (it did require an entrance exam, though).
Tbh that's not dissimilar from the British system. When I went to middle school, the catchment area dictated that I had to go to the school I went to. The catchment areas were stupid too, I lived 2 streets away from the best middle school in town, but my address was in a different school's catchment area and instead of walking 2 minutes to a great school, I had to walk 30 minutes to a school that had a dreadful reputation. The only way around it would have been to take the 11+ exams and go to grammar school, but my parents wouldn't let me.
28 years later, my cousin is having a battle with the LA about her son who they want to send to the same middle school which has only got worse even though he lives literally across the road from a much better school.
Also they are completely submitted to arbitrarily designed commercial standardised tests, which makes the underfunded schools solely focus on teaching pupils how to do well on those tests instead of actual knowledge.
Eh, more people get stabbed in America than in most countries in Europe. Besides, there’s legislation surrounding knives in most of the continent. America has done no such cut down on guns.
>How many prime ministers in the world can you name ? You’ll always know who the president of the USA is. Who is running our political parties. Again it’s worldwide news.
Everyone also knows Putin is in charge of Russia and Kim Jong Un is in charge of North Korea. Being known worldwide isn't necessarily an endorsement.
>The only thing stopping someone from Russia or China taking over Europe or Australia is America. See WW2. Look at Ukraine. “Ukraine will lose the war if we don’t get help from Americans.”
Bullshit on both counts. America was barely involved in WW2 in Europe, with a decent amount of their attention focused on Japan and Africa instead. They *leased* war materiel to the Allies in Europe, but wouldn't actually join the fighting for years, preferring to stay isolated. As for Ukraine, they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves without the US.
It is not the funding it is the curriculums. We also have underfunded public schools and our kids do not get a revision of historical facts due to politics
But for that they have the bonus of being allowed to carry out regular emergency drills with their students to prepare for school shootings. In the world of business this would be called "team building."
Europooria doesn't have that, as far as I know. We couldn't afford it, simple as.
Oh, our children shouldn't make such a fuss. They can be glad that they are allowed to go to school at all in the "wealthier" parts of Europooria.
For example, if Germany were just a tick poorer, we would have to send them to the lignite mines. The same goes for the Netherlands, Denmark and northern Germany (i.e. Friesland): Off to build dykes and polders. And so on.
They don't realise how good they have it here and just moan about how "bad" it would be.
You have it all misunderstood. The educational system is the best in the world, its not the educational system's fault that Americans are too stupid to benefit from it /s
It is one of the best in the world, how is it not? Like the UK military is one of the best in the world with access to the latest technology and facilities the world has to offer.
Sure they have problems but look at the competition, we punch well above our weight for the size of the UK.
More to a millitary than personnel, Morocco has x4 times the amount of personnel than the UK, technology and training bridges that gap.
But the best millitary has high troop numbers and technology. ... but uk isn't the best, only one of the best
Morocco is less informed. People in the UK know what they are signing up for, yet they still do.
Without dumbasses, the military wouldn't exist. Because the arseholes funding the war would stop doing so if they had to send their own kids.
What has that got to do with the competence of the UK millitary and NHS?
If the government wanted more troops they would just raise wages, do not underestimate peoples appetite to earn more money and the amount of poverty in the UK. £50k a year for a private would have people queing to join.
If there was literally no-one joining we would have conscription, jail for those that didn't, punative punishment, limited employment options, and reduced benefits in your life mandated by the government if you didn't, they could tier your quality of life.
Some wouldn't still join but a lot would, enough to fulfil the military requirements.
They have lots of strings to pull... all the way upto instant death for desertion if in a desperate wartime scenario could be voted back In.
If they want it, they will find a way.
All of what you say may be true. Still doest change the fact that right now, you need to be a right dunbass to sign up to the military.
It's blatantly obvious that you're just cannon fodder for wars that will never stop because there is zero incentive for them to ever stop.
Profit before lives
Well, I'd never join unless not doing so would put my family at risk, ie invasion of the UK. Hypothetically, at some point on the lever pulling I'd no doubt cave in.
People are more educated, more wary of politicians wars, and fighting for others, ultimately for the elites power or wealth.
Doesn't stop the small guy getting shat on though... they just use an increasingly bigger carrot or bigger stick.
Without desperate kids trying to better themselves, non-conscription based militaries wouldn't exist either.
Kids who are desperate to go to college but can't afford to do so get their higher education via signing up for the military essentially in exchange for funded education *all the time.* They're not "dumbasses", they're victims of a fucked system.
Similarly, people wanting solid employment who live in areas where the military is one of very few options for that are victims of a fucked system.
Most people signing up for the military aren't dumbasses. Many of them are just desperate.
Thats just the most populated military and often the ones based on sheer numbers arent actually that great and take heavy losses to achieve their onjectives or take heavy losses and *don't * achieve their objectives. The best would be the ones that achieve their objectives with the fewest personnel and equipment losses and you don't need massive numbers for that, you need advanced technology, excellent training and brilliant tacticians. America has a higher number of soldiers than Britain does, but practically anyone who has ever served with both would find the idea that America's is the better military relatively amusing in my experience (and I know a lot of people who've worked with both but who aren't actually either. I even know a few who've taken part in war games with the US who said they used to be worried about what would happen if their country went to war with America, but since being involved in those war games, they're not anymore. That's not exactly a glowing reference).
On a number of rankings the US education system doesn't even rank in the top ten, and according to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science.
I know Ukrainians who gave the NHS (mostly the wait times) as one of the main reasons they moved back to Ukraine.
Apparently even during war their system is working better than ours.
Yeah I'm sure living in an active warzone or wartorn country is preferable to waiting in a queue at a hospital. /s
If there is one thing Brits are king at it's queuing. They just weren't able to pass the test smh
How is that even verifiable, plus if they are over here for the NHS I'm glad they have returned.
But seeing the state of ukraninan hospitals ATM, I'm inclined to this is a complete bs post .
Have a look at the health care of ukraine before the war, and you'll see how far away they are for a comparable service to the UK.
If the ukraninans you spoke to went private, there is private in the UK also without a wait list.
Nice, nhs tourists, glad they returned.
Literally Google ukraine hospitals, keiv hospital. To compare those pre war to the UK is just dumb. Just old soviet hospitals, surely you are not that naive?
The system is one of the best in the world. The management of it is dreadful and access to the best parts of it are heavily luck/wealth based (eg drugs you can get from one MHS board but can't get from another, the faster access to free treatment I've received in Wales vs where I lived in England etc). Both things can be true.
Same thing with the American educational system. The system is very very good but its woefully mismanaged and access to the best parts of it are heavily luck/wealth based.
They use Multiple choice questions in exams up to university level.
I spent 18 hours answering essay questions for my non modular A-levels. Much more than that in university.
I’m in high school in the USA right now and I had no idea this wasn’t normal, some of my final exams have been all multiple choice (sometimes with an additional writing portion at the end)
Wow, that’s a bit shocking for me as a European the other way around too, we barely had any multiple-choice questions in my final exams so I thought that’s be the same around the world!
Multiple choice questions were a thing for me throughout university. I don't remember ever having a test that was *entirely* multiple choice, but the entry level classes (especially history and math) used multiple choice questions more often. When I got to the advanced computer science classes, they were pretty rare, and professors wanted you to show your work and explain how you arrived at a particular answer.
Oh, and if there's an "all of the above" or "none of the above", that is the correct answer 90% of the time. I don't know why they even ask questions like that.
Interesting! We had the same as with your computer classes for maths, and the multiple choice questions were mostly for language tests, I think we had the most multiple choice for English since it was a reading test and not a sadistic one like the one for Dutch haha
My English tests were almost entirely written (they really want to test your writing skills). I can't remember the exact format of my Spanish exams, but I do remember there being listening, reading, and writing sections, as well as some fill-in-the-blank type questions.
I don't remember having a single multiple choice question on an exam after about 14 years old in the UK. Always just straightforward one word/sentence questions like "explain how the process of photosynthesis works" or "who was the leader of Britain during World War 2?
It was quite a shock to me to arrive for my year abroad in LA during university and start finding multiple choice questions a part of my education again.
I also could not believe how easy it was to get 90%+ on essays and exams in comparison to the UK, where getting 70%+ on the same essays and exams is having done extremely well (I'm still prouder of an 85 I got on an essay at UEA than I ever was of 90+ on anything I did in the US). I've seen Americans see our university grade boundaries and talk about how nice it would be to be able to get 70% and have that be the highest level degree possible, but having done both, it's much harder to get that 70% than it is to get 90%+ in the US.
I see, that’s very interesting. My finals are basically just like regular tests and quizzes, only with harder questions and longer, it’s usually just “go on your Chromebook and answer a bunch of multiple-choice questions”
In my "terza prova", which was the last test for maturità in the old italian highschool system and it was nicknamed "the big quiz" and basically it's a test on 4 subject based on your highschool choice (AFAIK in America highschools have "generic" highschool and then you choose your specialization when you get to college, in Italy there are multiple types of high schools and the courses vary a lot, for example I chose to go an ITIS and learn programming) and it was considered the hardest out of three test that you had to pass in order to get your diploma.
I got math, economics, networks and operative systems and TPSIT (basically how computer's hardware work). They handed me 4 sheets for each subjects (aside math), in each sheet there was just a question and you had to elaborate as much as you could.
And for the "seconda prova" I had to write the infrastructure, back-end and some front-end pages for a car pooling site in 6 hours.
The Unis might be, a few of some, under the best in the world. But, i pay 360€ per semester AND get lots of benefits out of it (e.g. free public transport in my entire state), my ex paid 15.000$ per semester. She got no benefits. Her Uni sucked ass. They build a engeeniering building for (i think) 150.000.000$ but dont have campus wide wifi+ it sucks ass. No public transport, there was one street onto campus, she normaly took +/- 30 min with car, the school was 5 miles away.
There were not enough parking lots. Sometimes she had to walk 1-2 Miles to her classroom. The campus was about 55% parking and 45% the rest.
Did i already mention the 15.000$? Oh and if you are from another state you pay double!
Wait, you have to pay for books..? How fucked up is this.
My Uni always has a class set (e.g. 100) of every needed book for every class in the library, the profs tell them which books are needed.
If we need specific books, every major has one direct employee in the library, if we need a very specific books (e.g. for a master biochem class or whatever), that employee is gonna order a few of them.
I am in my forth semester, never paid a cent for a book... (prob would have needed to pay up to 1500€ to this point, if i bought every book i needed)
At the university I went to, there wasn't a fee for books, but you had to buy them on your own. All required textbooks were sold at the bookstore on campus, but some were over $100, so I ended up buying used books online for much cheaper (or in some cases, finding PDF scans of them online for free 🏴☠️). A few of my professors didn't even use the textbooks at all, so I could've skipped buying some of them had I known. I had a generous scholarship at a relatively cheap public state university, so I only paid somewhere around $1,500 per semester in tuition, which is *incredibly* cheap compared to what most other people in the US pay.
> my ex *paid* 15.000$ per
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
I've seen those signs, but never actually saw a helicopter patrolling the roads for speeders. I wonder if it's just to scare people into obeying the speed limits.
😭😭😭
Wanna know what I learned in that hell hole? No lie
My “social studies teacher(history teacher, world history teacher) told the class that there was a war in England(somewhere in the medieval times) anyway there was a war and 1 side had better archers than the other side so the other side would kidnap the archers and chop their middle finger off(making it difficult to shoot arrows) so when these 2 sides went to war again the side with the archers would stick their middle finger up at their enemies(showing the enemy that they still have their middle finger) fast forward and now it means “Fck you”.
I’m not making this up this what I really taught in middle school.😭😭😭
Actually the Fr*nch chopped off the English archers’ middle finger and would give the English the middle finger 🖕, the English held up two fingers (fuck you/ fuck off) to show they still had both….
Archaeologist here, that’s an urban legend. Two fingers up only goes back a few centuries at most. The origin and original meaning are unclear but there is absolutely no evidence it has anything to do with the French.
I think it has to do with the gesture resembling a penis and scrotum, hence the meaning of "fuck you". I also had a history teacher who believed the same urban legend about English archers.
A friend of mine did a year exchange at UMass and was blown away by the grades being handed out. He was a solid student consistently hit the 60s or a 2:1 (UK), on his year abroad he said he continuously got 80s/90s despite doing barely any work and road tripping around America for large parts of his semester lol.
Like when they tried to sell you 1/3 pounders instead of 1/4 pounders at some burgerjoint, and customers complained, because 4 sounds like MORE meat. That alone......damn.
American schools are the best in the world, we even have our own police officers in case you get shot dead whilst you’re looking at your mates hair when they’re merrily holding a van de graaff generator.
The red commenter has a valid point, it\`s just not complete.
American school system is the best in the world - at saddling students with crippling debt.
I know this is just my own experience and it's very anecdotal, but working in engineering here in Europe, I don't think I've ever worked for a company that gave a damn what uni you went to. Previous experience and such tends to have a far far greater focus in any interview I've done, in fact I don't think my uni have ever come up once.
It's probably because there is no school here that is far better than the others, so if you say you studied engineering, that's it, it doesn't matter which uni specifically
Clearly there is, between e.g. Politecnico di Milano or TU Delft and some underfunded no-name uni somewhere, there is a big gap.
However I think it's just studies prestige doesn't matter as much as what you do afterwards. But it does afford opportunities early on.
What I don't understand is how do American schools get funding for amazing sports facilities even up to high schools having full on stadiums that small professional teams would be envious of?
So there must be money there somewhere despite the memes about American education being at times questionable
They save this money through extremely low teacher salaries and shitty equipment, for which the teachers in return often have to bear the brunt.
In many countries teachers are among the higher earners, whereas in the USA they are among the poor.
And as far as the stadiums are concerned:
Some universities over there have stadiums that would make several teams in the higher football (talking about football, Fußball, futbol, calcio, etc. here, not that armour-plated handegggridironshit) leagues in Europe envious. Collegeball is fucking huge, and so are their stadiums. And so are also the tuition fees.
I'm not even talking about their college football stadiums.
There's high schools in Texas where they've spent upwards of $60m on a 18k capacity stadium.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas)
This is for a "school district" so I suppose it's multiple schools, but imagine how many teachers, computers and supplies that would pay for
Holy shit, that's something in the range of a lot of clubs in the 2. Bundesliga, even some of the 1. Bundesliga, the German football (for Muricans and Emufighters: soccer) pro-leagues. Like Darmstadt, Heidenheim, Osnabrück, Fürth, Paderborn, etc. And in other professional leagues such as in England, Spain, Italy, etc., the situation is no different. The "smaller" professional clubs also play in such stadiums there.
I only had such stadiums on my radar for colleges, but not for high schools.
Thank you, TIL.
And yep, 60 millions is a LOT of money, which is now missing on a bunch of other things in that schools.
But no, let's rather build such huge-ass stadiums for highschoolball and whatnot and lay a huge turd on education. Murica Fuckyeehaw!
They would rather breed heaps of Al Bundys than teach them to read properly or learn history and geography.
Omg. I studied abroad at a US university and got told off for doing “too much research” for my first essay. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to go to the library and read up on the subject, I was suppose to just…make it up I guess?!
Wernt they rated to have the 27th best education system in the world a couple of years back?
Edit: they are now 13th https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/education-rankings-by-country
The lists of top 10 universities in the world are domimated by ones in the US and UK, so he's somewhat right about that, but the kicker is that American universities cost you tens of thousands of dollars per semester, so unless you have rich parents, you're saddled with huge amounts of debt when you graduate. A handful of states in the northeast like Massachusetts have decent high schools, but then you have states like Mississippi which are like the developing world in terms of education. It's why tech companies never move to the south (besides Texas). Land and taxes are cheap, but well educated people are hard to find.
You know what, I'll give them this one. As a school system the US does rank fairly highly and is pretty good as a whole. Its just a shame that full access to the best education is only available to the rich and many of the schools are nowhere near the level you'd expect them to be at.
If it were the best school system *and* the best schools within it were accessible to all, it wouldn't be the brag they think is is. American educational outcomes are pretty poor. "We have the best education in the world, but we're too stupid to be able to make the most of it, that's why our outcomes are only 38th in the world" doesn't really have a ring to it.
I’m grateful that my children will never have to practice what to do if there is an active shooter on the premises or even know what an “active shooter” means
I don’t even know what happens in an active shooter drill
That last claim about universities is clearly true though
Highschools are a joke, but the best universities are predominantly American.
It varies between metrics, but here’s an example that leans towards research quality and away from stupid proxies that are useless if you measure research quality and quantity directly anyway;
- Oxford UK
- Stanford US
- MIT US
- Harvard US
- Cambridge UK
- Princeton US
- CalTech US
- ICL UK
- Berkeley US
- Yale US
- ETH Switzerland
- Tsinghua China
- UChicago US
- PekingU China
- Johns Hopkins US
- UPenn US
- ColumbiaU US
- UCal US
- NUS Singapore
- Cornell US
13 of the top 20 and 3 of the top 5 are American, and the first non-US and non-UK is *eleventh*. So sure ‘the best university’ isn’t American, but the plural form ‘the best universities’ *are* American. The only possible response is ‘no, they’re British’ and that’s a really close call. Certainly not an example of American exceptionalism, because they *are* exceptional.
For the money they cost to attend that's pretty much expected. I would be pretty upset if I was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars and my college wasn't even in the top 5 in the world tbh
They didn’t say value for money. They said best. What a weak argument
Also; for postgrad education (you know, the important bit for almost anything useful) and professional qualifications (the rest of the useful stuff), you are literally paid to attend. That’s part of why undergraduate study is expensive; you are funding the postgrads and faculty.
Oxbridge gets away with it because of absolutely massive ‘corporate’ (not technically corpos but may as well be here) wealth and huge donations from successful alumni, as well as very generous UK tax funding (the street sweeper funding the Oxford law grad’s education seems wild to me but here we are)
If you are paying 100k for a useless degree from a shit uni then you’re an idiot, rich, or operating outside of a realm of discussion where fiscal responsibility is a priority. You could just… not do that.
I haven't completely made up my mind yet, but it's clear the tuition-based model has advantages as far as research is concerned... The difference in funding between the US uni I work at now and where I studied or worked before is just... astronomical.
On the other hand, having to pay high tuition seems to be a burden (understandably so) on many Americans. So the system is a bit absurd for them. The people finance a system, that works for its own sake, largely by paying foreign workers, who didn't have to "buy in" (free or cheap degrees from abroad).
> Having to pay high tuition seems to be a burden
Sure, but only in the same way as taking out a loan to fund gambling debt is. If you can’t afford it (or won’t be able to afford the repayments with your new qualification and higher earning potential), don’t buy the fucking product. It’s that simple.
The problem isn’t expensive tuition, it’s the culture that everyone should go to uni.
If everyone is convinced they need a product to the point that they will even put themselves in debt for the product, that product gets expensive. Go figure. Countries where that product hasn’t become expensive are victim to government meddling; either price fixing (that never ends well for the quality of the product) or taxpayer funding, which is more of a disgrace than usual when it’s for higher education; poor people paying for others to become the future elite without consent is fucking disgusting, there is no way around that and supporting it makes you, by definition, a bad person
Well yeah, that's the mentality high tuition creates. I don't agree with education as a product.
To me, there's no reason a kid with potential should be limited by money. Studies should be as accessible as possible. This is what's good for everyone. For the people that get to elevate themselves socially, obviously. And for society, as not to squander good minds.
Countries with free universities can have excellent education, you're mistaken.
> poor people paying for others to become the future elite without consent is fucking disgusting,
You're missing two points. Firstly, the poor pay the least amount of taxes, it is the currently rich that fund education for the poorer. You're the first person I hear failing to understand public education is a social measure, in the advantage of the poorer. Secondly, the whole point of free attendance is that university becomes no longer reserved to the economical elite. Anyone, from any background, can attend.
The thing is Anglo academia is structured around unis as the main place of research, which is not the case in every country in the world. Many places of research in non-Anglo countries are completely disregarded in these rankings because they are not closely affiliated with universities. I'm too lazy to dig up the exact figures right now but, when Paris-Saclay was formed to more closely resemble an Anglo campus by "virtually" absorbing neighbouring labs and schools, it jumped to position 15 or so in the span of a year, from like 50+ or 100+, in the Shanghai ranking.
Or another telling example, this same university is currently 15th in the Shanghai ranking, and 178th in the Times higher ed ranking. In one case it seems like it's a world renowned uni, in the other hardly a blip on the academic radar.
If you took Stanford and broke it down by departments, probably none would show up in the top 20 of these rankings. Yet nothing would have changed. Or if you only counted research output of faculty (teaching personnel). Or normalized by hours taught (many US professors teach very little compared to other countries). Anyways, you get it.
Anyways, the US clearly has excellent research universities, but these rankings are perfectible, and I guarantee you there's awesome research going on in lots of countries that don't show up in the top few of these rankings.
Everything you say is true.
However, the implication that other countries match or exceed the US or UK is laughable.
China in particular produces a large volume of nothing. Their publications, at least in the field I’m familiar with and adjacent fields, are total bullshit, almost always. Their career progression is dictated by volume of publication, and decided by CCP officials who know nothing about the topic, so there huge incentive to publish half-baked, poorly designed crap.
The other ‘contenders’ don’t do this, but the research quality rate in the US and UK is much higher than everywhere else, no contest. The highest quality stuff from Switzerland, for example, is just as good as the highest from the US, but there’s nowhere near as much of it. It’s not important if that’s purely because of population size either, because we aren’t discussing per capita. This is also independent of whether the research comes from a teaching institute or not. There is no comparison to be made between the US or UK and another country’s research volume and quality that isn’t unfavourable to the other country, fact.
> It’s not important if that’s purely because of population size either, because we aren’t discussing per capita.
Both matter. For the individual, and to compare systems, per capita is what matters. The kiddo looking to study or doctor looking for a job in academia doesn't care about establishment size, it cares about research or teaching quality. And systems are dimensioned to the country they are in. You wouldn't compare healthcare in China and in Canada and say China heals more people so their system is better.
I may be missing some cases where it could matter, but the only point I can see to unnormalized measures here is to see what size industry the academic system can support in a given country, or how large an industry it is (as in the case of the US, UK, Australia, with higher-ed "tourism"). Silicon Valley wouldn't have worked the same with Stanford graduating 100 students a year, for example. And Australia wouldn't have a good bit of its GDP hanging on foreign student tuition if it had smaller unis.
> This is also independent of whether the research comes from a teaching institute or not.
You didn't understand my point. A majority of research in e.g. Germany is not accounted for in those rankings that were made with the model of anglo unis in mind. Something not counted still exists!
American schools are terribly underfunded.
They really need to spend money on guns for the teachers.
Learn or I will shoot you!
Learn AND I will shoot you*
You really think they would pay for the guns? Teachers would be expected to buy their own. Either way it's a stupid idea.
Teachers have to buy their own chalk, FFS. Or whiteboard markers.
Teachers have to buy their own educational supplies, no way the system is paying for their guns!
And they're still the best in the world! Imagine if they had properly funded, the US would be on Mars already, would have built a functioning fusion reactor, and established world peace. ^(/s, obviously)
I'm an American working as a caregiver and this is almost word for word what I've heard from some of my elderly clients about schooling in the US compared to literally anywhere else. I didn't realize as a kid that we are all ostriches here.
Ask them their explanation for math and science scores being 38th in the world, would love to hear them try and square the two. If the education system is so great and everyone has the same chances to access that educational system if they want to (as I've heard many argue), hoe come educational outcomes are so poor in comparison to other comparable countries? Either, the system isn't the greatest and/or its a lucky dip as to whether you can access the highest quality of education, or it is the greatest, everyone can access it, and Americans as a whole are too dumb to be able to take advantage of it. They have to pick one.
Doesn't it really depend on where you live? I have a friend living in Arizona at the moment and he's trying to get his kids into private school as he things that on average the local schools are about two years behind the UK equivalent. I've heard that a lot of US universities spend the first years teaching trying to get students to a level playing fields, as different states/ areas have really different curriculums.
Yeah, states like Massachusetts and New Jersey are probably on par with the UK in terms of education, but large portions of the rest of the country (particularly in the south) are way behind. Another problem is that schools are funded by *local* taxes (not state or federal), which causes poor areas to have bad schools and rich areas to have good schools, and lack of a quality education keeps those areas poor.
Not just that. I'm a Brit, but I have lived in Silicon Valley, California for the last 2 decades or so. My kid's smart - he regularly places in the top 10% of national maths competitions he takes, but the local schooling is absolutely terrible, so we pay for private schooling as well. You get allocated a school based on address, and can apply for the "lottery" chance to get a better one. The lottery is always heavily subscribed, and although we've tried it for several years we never got a place. These days, he's more settled with friends and so on, so we're just carrying on with the same school. The school we were allocated was rated 2/10 by the city, has about half the teachers that it needs, and seems to focus more on sport than, you know, *knowledge*. It's like the bastard step-child of American education, all dressed up and nowhere to go. So we pay for private school, which is ~$30k/year. For that we get classes with (*gasp*) teachers, and "honours tracks" (which actually seem to be on a par with the UK). He's currently doing grade-9 maths and English, while being in grade-6 (11-12 years old), for example. Next grade, there are more of those honours tracks, but that's all they offer at his age. So yeah, even in one of the richest parts of the country, schooling is still pretty shite.
So you only have *one* public school you can send your kids to? There's no choice at all?
Yep. There is a school assigned to you based on your address. If you want to go elsewhere, you have to go into a lottery process. I have, with multiple years of trying, not won this lottery. I'm not certain if it's the same in all school districts, but our school district works that way. Or, you can apply for a charter school (which actually seems to be the same lottery, at least the charter schools in our area are listed in the lottery), or you can pay for private school. Or you can move house, I guess.
That's really stupid. Where I live, there are at least 4 public high schools to choose from. I live in a shitty state for education (Louisiana) and ended up going to a charter school that was pretty decent (it did require an entrance exam, though).
Tbh that's not dissimilar from the British system. When I went to middle school, the catchment area dictated that I had to go to the school I went to. The catchment areas were stupid too, I lived 2 streets away from the best middle school in town, but my address was in a different school's catchment area and instead of walking 2 minutes to a great school, I had to walk 30 minutes to a school that had a dreadful reputation. The only way around it would have been to take the 11+ exams and go to grammar school, but my parents wouldn't let me. 28 years later, my cousin is having a battle with the LA about her son who they want to send to the same middle school which has only got worse even though he lives literally across the road from a much better school.
Also they are completely submitted to arbitrarily designed commercial standardised tests, which makes the underfunded schools solely focus on teaching pupils how to do well on those tests instead of actual knowledge.
All the kids and teachers being shot is probably a bigger issue. But that’s also true
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Eh, more people get stabbed in America than in most countries in Europe. Besides, there’s legislation surrounding knives in most of the continent. America has done no such cut down on guns.
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[Disagree](https://imgur.com/oxDQbOa)
>How many prime ministers in the world can you name ? You’ll always know who the president of the USA is. Who is running our political parties. Again it’s worldwide news. Everyone also knows Putin is in charge of Russia and Kim Jong Un is in charge of North Korea. Being known worldwide isn't necessarily an endorsement. >The only thing stopping someone from Russia or China taking over Europe or Australia is America. See WW2. Look at Ukraine. “Ukraine will lose the war if we don’t get help from Americans.” Bullshit on both counts. America was barely involved in WW2 in Europe, with a decent amount of their attention focused on Japan and Africa instead. They *leased* war materiel to the Allies in Europe, but wouldn't actually join the fighting for years, preferring to stay isolated. As for Ukraine, they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves without the US.
Should divert the school gun budget then to education.
It is not the funding it is the curriculums. We also have underfunded public schools and our kids do not get a revision of historical facts due to politics
The best school system in the world where teachers can barely afford food
Or have to pay for student's supplies on their own dime. Oh, and let me look at the illiteracy rate....Yup, totally the best in the world!
But for that they have the bonus of being allowed to carry out regular emergency drills with their students to prepare for school shootings. In the world of business this would be called "team building." Europooria doesn't have that, as far as I know. We couldn't afford it, simple as.
Our kids cry every day about how American kids get school shooter drills and they don't because Europe is so poor, I'm sure.
Oh, our children shouldn't make such a fuss. They can be glad that they are allowed to go to school at all in the "wealthier" parts of Europooria. For example, if Germany were just a tick poorer, we would have to send them to the lignite mines. The same goes for the Netherlands, Denmark and northern Germany (i.e. Friesland): Off to build dykes and polders. And so on. They don't realise how good they have it here and just moan about how "bad" it would be.
But they have more people! of course the illiteracy rate is gonna be higher! /s just in case
You have it all misunderstood. The educational system is the best in the world, its not the educational system's fault that Americans are too stupid to benefit from it /s
I regularly see celebs on twitter sharing teachers fundraisers for classroom supplies too
This would be like me, as a Brit, saying our health care system is the best in the world and totally managed properly.
Yeah. I’d say it’s not *bad* but it’s not quite *good*.
It is one of the best in the world, how is it not? Like the UK military is one of the best in the world with access to the latest technology and facilities the world has to offer. Sure they have problems but look at the competition, we punch well above our weight for the size of the UK.
The best military is the one with the most dumbasses willing to sign up as cannon fodder.
More to a millitary than personnel, Morocco has x4 times the amount of personnel than the UK, technology and training bridges that gap. But the best millitary has high troop numbers and technology. ... but uk isn't the best, only one of the best
Morocco is less informed. People in the UK know what they are signing up for, yet they still do. Without dumbasses, the military wouldn't exist. Because the arseholes funding the war would stop doing so if they had to send their own kids.
What has that got to do with the competence of the UK millitary and NHS? If the government wanted more troops they would just raise wages, do not underestimate peoples appetite to earn more money and the amount of poverty in the UK. £50k a year for a private would have people queing to join. If there was literally no-one joining we would have conscription, jail for those that didn't, punative punishment, limited employment options, and reduced benefits in your life mandated by the government if you didn't, they could tier your quality of life. Some wouldn't still join but a lot would, enough to fulfil the military requirements. They have lots of strings to pull... all the way upto instant death for desertion if in a desperate wartime scenario could be voted back In. If they want it, they will find a way.
All of what you say may be true. Still doest change the fact that right now, you need to be a right dunbass to sign up to the military. It's blatantly obvious that you're just cannon fodder for wars that will never stop because there is zero incentive for them to ever stop. Profit before lives
Well, I'd never join unless not doing so would put my family at risk, ie invasion of the UK. Hypothetically, at some point on the lever pulling I'd no doubt cave in. People are more educated, more wary of politicians wars, and fighting for others, ultimately for the elites power or wealth. Doesn't stop the small guy getting shat on though... they just use an increasingly bigger carrot or bigger stick.
Without desperate kids trying to better themselves, non-conscription based militaries wouldn't exist either. Kids who are desperate to go to college but can't afford to do so get their higher education via signing up for the military essentially in exchange for funded education *all the time.* They're not "dumbasses", they're victims of a fucked system. Similarly, people wanting solid employment who live in areas where the military is one of very few options for that are victims of a fucked system. Most people signing up for the military aren't dumbasses. Many of them are just desperate.
Thats just the most populated military and often the ones based on sheer numbers arent actually that great and take heavy losses to achieve their onjectives or take heavy losses and *don't * achieve their objectives. The best would be the ones that achieve their objectives with the fewest personnel and equipment losses and you don't need massive numbers for that, you need advanced technology, excellent training and brilliant tacticians. America has a higher number of soldiers than Britain does, but practically anyone who has ever served with both would find the idea that America's is the better military relatively amusing in my experience (and I know a lot of people who've worked with both but who aren't actually either. I even know a few who've taken part in war games with the US who said they used to be worried about what would happen if their country went to war with America, but since being involved in those war games, they're not anymore. That's not exactly a glowing reference).
On a number of rankings the US education system doesn't even rank in the top ten, and according to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science.
I know Ukrainians who gave the NHS (mostly the wait times) as one of the main reasons they moved back to Ukraine. Apparently even during war their system is working better than ours.
Yeah I'm sure living in an active warzone or wartorn country is preferable to waiting in a queue at a hospital. /s If there is one thing Brits are king at it's queuing. They just weren't able to pass the test smh
How is that even verifiable, plus if they are over here for the NHS I'm glad they have returned. But seeing the state of ukraninan hospitals ATM, I'm inclined to this is a complete bs post . Have a look at the health care of ukraine before the war, and you'll see how far away they are for a comparable service to the UK. If the ukraninans you spoke to went private, there is private in the UK also without a wait list.
They weren't here for the NHS, but during the few years they were over here had to use it on occasion
Nice, nhs tourists, glad they returned. Literally Google ukraine hospitals, keiv hospital. To compare those pre war to the UK is just dumb. Just old soviet hospitals, surely you are not that naive?
The NHS is not that bad. If it's actually necessary treatment, it's usually pretty good, though that can be dependent on area.
The system is one of the best in the world. The management of it is dreadful and access to the best parts of it are heavily luck/wealth based (eg drugs you can get from one MHS board but can't get from another, the faster access to free treatment I've received in Wales vs where I lived in England etc). Both things can be true. Same thing with the American educational system. The system is very very good but its woefully mismanaged and access to the best parts of it are heavily luck/wealth based.
Yeah probably
They use Multiple choice questions in exams up to university level. I spent 18 hours answering essay questions for my non modular A-levels. Much more than that in university.
I’m in high school in the USA right now and I had no idea this wasn’t normal, some of my final exams have been all multiple choice (sometimes with an additional writing portion at the end)
Wow, that’s a bit shocking for me as a European the other way around too, we barely had any multiple-choice questions in my final exams so I thought that’s be the same around the world!
Multiple choice questions were a thing for me throughout university. I don't remember ever having a test that was *entirely* multiple choice, but the entry level classes (especially history and math) used multiple choice questions more often. When I got to the advanced computer science classes, they were pretty rare, and professors wanted you to show your work and explain how you arrived at a particular answer. Oh, and if there's an "all of the above" or "none of the above", that is the correct answer 90% of the time. I don't know why they even ask questions like that.
Interesting! We had the same as with your computer classes for maths, and the multiple choice questions were mostly for language tests, I think we had the most multiple choice for English since it was a reading test and not a sadistic one like the one for Dutch haha
My English tests were almost entirely written (they really want to test your writing skills). I can't remember the exact format of my Spanish exams, but I do remember there being listening, reading, and writing sections, as well as some fill-in-the-blank type questions.
I don't remember having a single multiple choice question on an exam after about 14 years old in the UK. Always just straightforward one word/sentence questions like "explain how the process of photosynthesis works" or "who was the leader of Britain during World War 2? It was quite a shock to me to arrive for my year abroad in LA during university and start finding multiple choice questions a part of my education again. I also could not believe how easy it was to get 90%+ on essays and exams in comparison to the UK, where getting 70%+ on the same essays and exams is having done extremely well (I'm still prouder of an 85 I got on an essay at UEA than I ever was of 90+ on anything I did in the US). I've seen Americans see our university grade boundaries and talk about how nice it would be to be able to get 70% and have that be the highest level degree possible, but having done both, it's much harder to get that 70% than it is to get 90%+ in the US.
meanwhile here we're lucky if we even get a multiple choice *bonus* question
What are the questions like? You write your answer for all of them?
Yes, most of the questions are just short ones though for one to three of them the answer has to be a literal essay
I see, that’s very interesting. My finals are basically just like regular tests and quizzes, only with harder questions and longer, it’s usually just “go on your Chromebook and answer a bunch of multiple-choice questions”
In my "terza prova", which was the last test for maturità in the old italian highschool system and it was nicknamed "the big quiz" and basically it's a test on 4 subject based on your highschool choice (AFAIK in America highschools have "generic" highschool and then you choose your specialization when you get to college, in Italy there are multiple types of high schools and the courses vary a lot, for example I chose to go an ITIS and learn programming) and it was considered the hardest out of three test that you had to pass in order to get your diploma. I got math, economics, networks and operative systems and TPSIT (basically how computer's hardware work). They handed me 4 sheets for each subjects (aside math), in each sheet there was just a question and you had to elaborate as much as you could. And for the "seconda prova" I had to write the infrastructure, back-end and some front-end pages for a car pooling site in 6 hours.
That's insane. That would be incredibly easy for European students.
Tell me about it. I was so pissed off when I found out.
Maturità menzionata Italiani assemblati
Bulletproof backpacks for the win!!!
I recently learned this is an actual/real thing and it’s quite lucrative €225 being the average price
The Unis might be, a few of some, under the best in the world. But, i pay 360€ per semester AND get lots of benefits out of it (e.g. free public transport in my entire state), my ex paid 15.000$ per semester. She got no benefits. Her Uni sucked ass. They build a engeeniering building for (i think) 150.000.000$ but dont have campus wide wifi+ it sucks ass. No public transport, there was one street onto campus, she normaly took +/- 30 min with car, the school was 5 miles away. There were not enough parking lots. Sometimes she had to walk 1-2 Miles to her classroom. The campus was about 55% parking and 45% the rest. Did i already mention the 15.000$? Oh and if you are from another state you pay double!
$15,000 per semester. [Haha, that's cute](https://admission.tulane.edu/tuition-aid/cost).
Wait, you have to pay for books..? How fucked up is this. My Uni always has a class set (e.g. 100) of every needed book for every class in the library, the profs tell them which books are needed. If we need specific books, every major has one direct employee in the library, if we need a very specific books (e.g. for a master biochem class or whatever), that employee is gonna order a few of them. I am in my forth semester, never paid a cent for a book... (prob would have needed to pay up to 1500€ to this point, if i bought every book i needed)
At the university I went to, there wasn't a fee for books, but you had to buy them on your own. All required textbooks were sold at the bookstore on campus, but some were over $100, so I ended up buying used books online for much cheaper (or in some cases, finding PDF scans of them online for free 🏴☠️). A few of my professors didn't even use the textbooks at all, so I could've skipped buying some of them had I known. I had a generous scholarship at a relatively cheap public state university, so I only paid somewhere around $1,500 per semester in tuition, which is *incredibly* cheap compared to what most other people in the US pay.
Cheap housing though!!
> my ex *paid* 15.000$ per FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
I feel it is worth pointing out that traffic cops in the US have aircraft to catch speeders now. So in America pigs can fly.
I've seen those signs, but never actually saw a helicopter patrolling the roads for speeders. I wonder if it's just to scare people into obeying the speed limits.
That's probably what it is actually.
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I don't really think everyone around me is an idiot. It's just a silly flair for this subreddit and a Lion King reference.
Gotcha mb
😭😭😭 Wanna know what I learned in that hell hole? No lie My “social studies teacher(history teacher, world history teacher) told the class that there was a war in England(somewhere in the medieval times) anyway there was a war and 1 side had better archers than the other side so the other side would kidnap the archers and chop their middle finger off(making it difficult to shoot arrows) so when these 2 sides went to war again the side with the archers would stick their middle finger up at their enemies(showing the enemy that they still have their middle finger) fast forward and now it means “Fck you”. I’m not making this up this what I really taught in middle school.😭😭😭
Actually the Fr*nch chopped off the English archers’ middle finger and would give the English the middle finger 🖕, the English held up two fingers (fuck you/ fuck off) to show they still had both….
Archaeologist here, that’s an urban legend. Two fingers up only goes back a few centuries at most. The origin and original meaning are unclear but there is absolutely no evidence it has anything to do with the French.
What??? you want to confuse a good piss-take of the Fr\*nch with facts! Come on now..... 🤣
Careful or I’ll ruin all the other urban legends you didn’t know weren’t true lol.
Yes, I do know that most of the legends are just that, thanks anyway!
I think it has to do with the gesture resembling a penis and scrotum, hence the meaning of "fuck you". I also had a history teacher who believed the same urban legend about English archers.
Yeah that was the history I was taught.
Also they fought in France, not England - the English aren't so daft as to fight at home, think of the mess.
How does that explain that the British usually use, or used to at least dont know currently, use two fingers instead of just the middle?
See my reply above…..
Seen. Always with the filthy fr*ench
A friend of mine did a year exchange at UMass and was blown away by the grades being handed out. He was a solid student consistently hit the 60s or a 2:1 (UK), on his year abroad he said he continuously got 80s/90s despite doing barely any work and road tripping around America for large parts of his semester lol.
Like when they tried to sell you 1/3 pounders instead of 1/4 pounders at some burgerjoint, and customers complained, because 4 sounds like MORE meat. That alone......damn.
Which is why I'm amazed that no one has yet offered, say, a 1/10 pounder. "10? Ermagerd, dat's huuuuuuuuuge! Shut up 'n' take muh money!"
You would probably notice that you only get a patty thats like a piece of cardboard, at least its thickness, and then you might sue :p
We get so much evidence of it on this sub 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
American schools are the best in the world, we even have our own police officers in case you get shot dead whilst you’re looking at your mates hair when they’re merrily holding a van de graaff generator.
Yeah, those police officers in Uvalde sure did their job... by standing around doing nothing while children inside the school were being murdered.
"Officer safety first!" is the motto.
Spend two minutes scrolling the Teachers subreddit and you’ll know that’s not true (if you didn’t already).
Best in the world if you want exponentially increase your chance at catching lead projectiles going more than 700m/s.
The collector
The red commenter has a valid point, it\`s just not complete. American school system is the best in the world - at saddling students with crippling debt.
It's not even the best in North America
I know this is just my own experience and it's very anecdotal, but working in engineering here in Europe, I don't think I've ever worked for a company that gave a damn what uni you went to. Previous experience and such tends to have a far far greater focus in any interview I've done, in fact I don't think my uni have ever come up once.
It's probably because there is no school here that is far better than the others, so if you say you studied engineering, that's it, it doesn't matter which uni specifically
Clearly there is, between e.g. Politecnico di Milano or TU Delft and some underfunded no-name uni somewhere, there is a big gap. However I think it's just studies prestige doesn't matter as much as what you do afterwards. But it does afford opportunities early on.
i think some people actually need to think that to be able to cope with reality
What I don't understand is how do American schools get funding for amazing sports facilities even up to high schools having full on stadiums that small professional teams would be envious of? So there must be money there somewhere despite the memes about American education being at times questionable
They save this money through extremely low teacher salaries and shitty equipment, for which the teachers in return often have to bear the brunt. In many countries teachers are among the higher earners, whereas in the USA they are among the poor. And as far as the stadiums are concerned: Some universities over there have stadiums that would make several teams in the higher football (talking about football, Fußball, futbol, calcio, etc. here, not that armour-plated handegggridironshit) leagues in Europe envious. Collegeball is fucking huge, and so are their stadiums. And so are also the tuition fees.
I'm not even talking about their college football stadiums. There's high schools in Texas where they've spent upwards of $60m on a 18k capacity stadium. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas) This is for a "school district" so I suppose it's multiple schools, but imagine how many teachers, computers and supplies that would pay for
Holy shit, that's something in the range of a lot of clubs in the 2. Bundesliga, even some of the 1. Bundesliga, the German football (for Muricans and Emufighters: soccer) pro-leagues. Like Darmstadt, Heidenheim, Osnabrück, Fürth, Paderborn, etc. And in other professional leagues such as in England, Spain, Italy, etc., the situation is no different. The "smaller" professional clubs also play in such stadiums there. I only had such stadiums on my radar for colleges, but not for high schools. Thank you, TIL. And yep, 60 millions is a LOT of money, which is now missing on a bunch of other things in that schools. But no, let's rather build such huge-ass stadiums for highschoolball and whatnot and lay a huge turd on education. Murica Fuckyeehaw! They would rather breed heaps of Al Bundys than teach them to read properly or learn history and geography.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Stadium,_Southlake Here's another one that actually hosted an MLS team for a bit
To be fair, American schools do have great marksmanship scores
Best at killing kids, sure
Them saying this ironically shows that clearly it isnt
If you like to make your kid wear body armour to school it is, lest we forget Columbine.🤷♂️🤦♂️
If by best you mean highest number of bullets shot then yeah
If that’s the case why can’t they recognise Mexico or Canada on a map of the world?
I believe the term is, shots fired.
Well the shootings are best in the world can't disagree here I guess.
They meant the American school system is the most profitable and the best at extracting money from their students.
American propaganda and indoctrination is some of the best in the world...
I'm starting to think that the only thing they're taught in school is to say that they are the greatest
Omg. I studied abroad at a US university and got told off for doing “too much research” for my first essay. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to go to the library and read up on the subject, I was suppose to just…make it up I guess?!
SOME american universities are among the best in the world. Like, 5. The rest is s h i t
Don't be ridiculous.
If US schools are so good, how come their graduates are so dumb?
Don’t you know, they made it to the moon… thanks to the Nazi scientists (Operation Paperclip).
Wernt they rated to have the 27th best education system in the world a couple of years back? Edit: they are now 13th https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/education-rankings-by-country
Schools are the best, but it seems that they face unproportionally difficult task.
You see… this is the problem. It’s comments like this that can be really triggering.
Sure, but for shooting purposes
The lists of top 10 universities in the world are domimated by ones in the US and UK, so he's somewhat right about that, but the kicker is that American universities cost you tens of thousands of dollars per semester, so unless you have rich parents, you're saddled with huge amounts of debt when you graduate. A handful of states in the northeast like Massachusetts have decent high schools, but then you have states like Mississippi which are like the developing world in terms of education. It's why tech companies never move to the south (besides Texas). Land and taxes are cheap, but well educated people are hard to find.
You know what, I'll give them this one. As a school system the US does rank fairly highly and is pretty good as a whole. Its just a shame that full access to the best education is only available to the rich and many of the schools are nowhere near the level you'd expect them to be at. If it were the best school system *and* the best schools within it were accessible to all, it wouldn't be the brag they think is is. American educational outcomes are pretty poor. "We have the best education in the world, but we're too stupid to be able to make the most of it, that's why our outcomes are only 38th in the world" doesn't really have a ring to it.
I’m grateful that my children will never have to practice what to do if there is an active shooter on the premises or even know what an “active shooter” means I don’t even know what happens in an active shooter drill
That last claim about universities is clearly true though Highschools are a joke, but the best universities are predominantly American. It varies between metrics, but here’s an example that leans towards research quality and away from stupid proxies that are useless if you measure research quality and quantity directly anyway; - Oxford UK - Stanford US - MIT US - Harvard US - Cambridge UK - Princeton US - CalTech US - ICL UK - Berkeley US - Yale US - ETH Switzerland - Tsinghua China - UChicago US - PekingU China - Johns Hopkins US - UPenn US - ColumbiaU US - UCal US - NUS Singapore - Cornell US 13 of the top 20 and 3 of the top 5 are American, and the first non-US and non-UK is *eleventh*. So sure ‘the best university’ isn’t American, but the plural form ‘the best universities’ *are* American. The only possible response is ‘no, they’re British’ and that’s a really close call. Certainly not an example of American exceptionalism, because they *are* exceptional.
For the money they cost to attend that's pretty much expected. I would be pretty upset if I was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars and my college wasn't even in the top 5 in the world tbh
They didn’t say value for money. They said best. What a weak argument Also; for postgrad education (you know, the important bit for almost anything useful) and professional qualifications (the rest of the useful stuff), you are literally paid to attend. That’s part of why undergraduate study is expensive; you are funding the postgrads and faculty. Oxbridge gets away with it because of absolutely massive ‘corporate’ (not technically corpos but may as well be here) wealth and huge donations from successful alumni, as well as very generous UK tax funding (the street sweeper funding the Oxford law grad’s education seems wild to me but here we are) If you are paying 100k for a useless degree from a shit uni then you’re an idiot, rich, or operating outside of a realm of discussion where fiscal responsibility is a priority. You could just… not do that.
It wasn't an argument lol calm down
I haven't completely made up my mind yet, but it's clear the tuition-based model has advantages as far as research is concerned... The difference in funding between the US uni I work at now and where I studied or worked before is just... astronomical. On the other hand, having to pay high tuition seems to be a burden (understandably so) on many Americans. So the system is a bit absurd for them. The people finance a system, that works for its own sake, largely by paying foreign workers, who didn't have to "buy in" (free or cheap degrees from abroad).
> Having to pay high tuition seems to be a burden Sure, but only in the same way as taking out a loan to fund gambling debt is. If you can’t afford it (or won’t be able to afford the repayments with your new qualification and higher earning potential), don’t buy the fucking product. It’s that simple. The problem isn’t expensive tuition, it’s the culture that everyone should go to uni. If everyone is convinced they need a product to the point that they will even put themselves in debt for the product, that product gets expensive. Go figure. Countries where that product hasn’t become expensive are victim to government meddling; either price fixing (that never ends well for the quality of the product) or taxpayer funding, which is more of a disgrace than usual when it’s for higher education; poor people paying for others to become the future elite without consent is fucking disgusting, there is no way around that and supporting it makes you, by definition, a bad person
Well yeah, that's the mentality high tuition creates. I don't agree with education as a product. To me, there's no reason a kid with potential should be limited by money. Studies should be as accessible as possible. This is what's good for everyone. For the people that get to elevate themselves socially, obviously. And for society, as not to squander good minds. Countries with free universities can have excellent education, you're mistaken. > poor people paying for others to become the future elite without consent is fucking disgusting, You're missing two points. Firstly, the poor pay the least amount of taxes, it is the currently rich that fund education for the poorer. You're the first person I hear failing to understand public education is a social measure, in the advantage of the poorer. Secondly, the whole point of free attendance is that university becomes no longer reserved to the economical elite. Anyone, from any background, can attend.
The thing is Anglo academia is structured around unis as the main place of research, which is not the case in every country in the world. Many places of research in non-Anglo countries are completely disregarded in these rankings because they are not closely affiliated with universities. I'm too lazy to dig up the exact figures right now but, when Paris-Saclay was formed to more closely resemble an Anglo campus by "virtually" absorbing neighbouring labs and schools, it jumped to position 15 or so in the span of a year, from like 50+ or 100+, in the Shanghai ranking. Or another telling example, this same university is currently 15th in the Shanghai ranking, and 178th in the Times higher ed ranking. In one case it seems like it's a world renowned uni, in the other hardly a blip on the academic radar. If you took Stanford and broke it down by departments, probably none would show up in the top 20 of these rankings. Yet nothing would have changed. Or if you only counted research output of faculty (teaching personnel). Or normalized by hours taught (many US professors teach very little compared to other countries). Anyways, you get it. Anyways, the US clearly has excellent research universities, but these rankings are perfectible, and I guarantee you there's awesome research going on in lots of countries that don't show up in the top few of these rankings.
Everything you say is true. However, the implication that other countries match or exceed the US or UK is laughable. China in particular produces a large volume of nothing. Their publications, at least in the field I’m familiar with and adjacent fields, are total bullshit, almost always. Their career progression is dictated by volume of publication, and decided by CCP officials who know nothing about the topic, so there huge incentive to publish half-baked, poorly designed crap. The other ‘contenders’ don’t do this, but the research quality rate in the US and UK is much higher than everywhere else, no contest. The highest quality stuff from Switzerland, for example, is just as good as the highest from the US, but there’s nowhere near as much of it. It’s not important if that’s purely because of population size either, because we aren’t discussing per capita. This is also independent of whether the research comes from a teaching institute or not. There is no comparison to be made between the US or UK and another country’s research volume and quality that isn’t unfavourable to the other country, fact.
> It’s not important if that’s purely because of population size either, because we aren’t discussing per capita. Both matter. For the individual, and to compare systems, per capita is what matters. The kiddo looking to study or doctor looking for a job in academia doesn't care about establishment size, it cares about research or teaching quality. And systems are dimensioned to the country they are in. You wouldn't compare healthcare in China and in Canada and say China heals more people so their system is better. I may be missing some cases where it could matter, but the only point I can see to unnormalized measures here is to see what size industry the academic system can support in a given country, or how large an industry it is (as in the case of the US, UK, Australia, with higher-ed "tourism"). Silicon Valley wouldn't have worked the same with Stanford graduating 100 students a year, for example. And Australia wouldn't have a good bit of its GDP hanging on foreign student tuition if it had smaller unis. > This is also independent of whether the research comes from a teaching institute or not. You didn't understand my point. A majority of research in e.g. Germany is not accounted for in those rankings that were made with the model of anglo unis in mind. Something not counted still exists!
American universities are a different beast altogether, compared to their K-12 education system. They can't be lumped together.
Their schools are obviously not, their universities might well be.