Are US college degrees: Still the best among world's top universities?

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by Lerner, Jun 3, 2010.

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  1. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member

    US college degrees: Still the best among world's top universities? - Yahoo! News

    "The quality of the US's higher education system has historically been a powerful magnet," says Irwin Feller, who headed the Institute for Policy Research and Evaluation at Pennsylvania State University for 24 years and has served on a number of national committees on education policy. "We have been that sucking sound that has attracted the best and the brightest from around the world."
     
  2. SurfDoctor

    SurfDoctor Moderator

    Aside from the fact that this was published by Yahoo, I believe this story has merit. It appears that American universities are losing ground to foreign universities. Tuition increases are making it more difficult for students to afford an American education and financial aid has not kept the pace. Because of this, students must borrow so heavily to go to a university to a point that it's becoming difficult to bear the burden. Foreign universities are becoming more attractive because they are often cheaper and they are now more academically sound. We could be losing ground.
     
  3. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Interestingly enough Clark Howard (who, for what it's worth, gives superb advice half the time and just makes stuff up the rest of the time) believes that the opposite is true with tuition. He says the reason tuition is so high is because the availability of student financial aid has made schools lazy with their budgets.
     
  4. Lukeness

    Lukeness Member

    Interestingly, in South Africa we were always led to believe that the education system in the US was inferior (admittedly, this could have been nationalist bullshit, and excludes the big name colleges like Harvard, Yale etc). There has also long been false the stereotype of 'stupid Americans' (not helped by George Bush) which has further entrenched this. People from around the world always want to get into the US because they believe there is more money and a better quality of life, and sometimes a US education can help get that.
     
  5. SurfDoctor

    SurfDoctor Moderator

    Youu arre makun me madd sayun us Amerekanz ar stoopid
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 4, 2010
  6. SurfDoctor

    SurfDoctor Moderator

    Silliness aside, you have brought up a point that I have often considered. America is often falsely viewed as a wealthy nation where most people have an easy life. I have an American friend who married a girl while living in Russia as a missionary. Her dream was to move to the US and become a "rich and lazy American". He reluctantly agreed to move back and they have struggled since then. He can't find a good job and she is shocked that it's not like the media portrays it to be. The only contact that people in other countries have with Americans is with the tourists, many who probably are fat, rich and selfish. Maybe they also watch television shows that also cast us in a bad light.

    The opposite is usually true; the average American is working their fingers to the bone and barely keeping the bills paid. One thing I'll admit though, some Americans are rather stupid. Many others, however, are quite brilliant. I would assume it's that way all over the world.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 4, 2010
  7. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Well, to be fair, we work less hours and have higher wages than most of the world. Our bills are also for different things. Running water we take for granted, and consider lack of electricity to be a hardship. None of this means that making it here is easy, and our service-related jobs are often as mentally stressful as hard labor is physically stressful, with a similar total-meltdown effect at the end of the week. Also, it would not be possible to survive in this society without paying for our utilities and transportation and YES, clothes. The standard of living, and in turn, the standard of social expectations are higher. Not that I am a triumph of the modern world, but I work less than half of what most people in this country do, make about half of what most people in this country do, and still manage to find a few extra thousand in my savings account each year. One of my friends says about this "BUT YOU HAVE NO BILLS!!!" Well of course not, silly, because I can't afford them :)

    Err, ok what was my point... oh yeah, stereotypes are a pain.
     
  8. SurfDoctor

    SurfDoctor Moderator

    You are absolutely right, MC. Even the poorest of us in the USA have it better than most do in third world countries. I was only making the comparison between the USA and other developed nations to point out that most Americans are not rich and lazy.

    As for your living inexpensively, you might be the smartest one of us all! It's all these debts we create for ourselves that cause hypertension and heart attacks!
     
  9. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    You know, if you keep saying that, I might be tempted to change my username to what I originally wanted it to be: Maniac Brainiac.

    Actually, it is true that I have no bills, but its because I choose to have none. Note that I consider children to be a bill, and so have none of those either :) That is a real game changer in budget planning, I know, so it isn't like I'm really doing anything spectacular here.

    However, I am not the opitome of frugality. Have you ever heard of Ken Kifer? He has since died, but his website is still up. He lived in a cabin that he built himself and used a bicycle to get around everywhere, including cycling tours that took him thousands of miles from home. He was a fan of Henry David Thoreau's Walden and envisioned a world where technological development flourished, but was made sustainable and didn't make life more complicated. He was basically a drug-free hippie who blogged (before they were called blogs!) from a solar powered laptop.

    Anyway, if you never read Walden, Thoreau makes an incredible point that I use as part of my budget philosophy. In his day, it would take the exact same ammount of time to work enough to pay for a train ticket as it would to simply leave and walk to your destination (an amazing concept!!!). However, the walker got to enjoy the great outdoors and the worker was stuck working :p
     
  10. SurfDoctor

    SurfDoctor Moderator

    Now I want to read Walden!
     
  11. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Its boring, but at times insightful.

    RE: American education. I'm not so sure that its worse than it used to be, but it is certain that developing countries are catching up. Also, I second the unfortunate opinion that many Americans are stupid, and would like to add that it is because they choose to be. Our education system aims to accomodate everyone, which I don't think is a bad thing, but it means that many of the willfully stupid people will just get by and bring down the reputation of education as a whole. I'm sure that's at least part of why a High School diploma means nothing anymore- both the best and worst students in this country get one. This is especially true of grade school, but I'm certain it trickles up to college as well. If CLEP really is equivalent of first and second year college classes, I'm happy that I'm skipping passed most of it and starting courses at junior and senior level soon.
     
  12. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Sure. I don't know of any reason to believe that's changing dramatically.

    I'm not saying that American universities are uniquely the world's best. But name virtually any field of study, and American universities are included among the leaders.

    In general, American higher educxtion has some advantages that schools in many other countries don't enjoy.

    Almost (but not quite) uniquely, the United States has a productive and prestigious private university sector. Even the countries that are most similar to the United States in other ways (like Canada) can't always say that. In many countries, 'private universities' are underfunded, unaccredited and often little better than mills, living in the shadow of the state universities. In the US they include international-class schools like Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT and the Ivy League.

    Associated with that is much better funding. In some cases foreign governments spend about the same percentage of GDP on publicly-funded higher educxtion as American governments do. But the US adds that much again in private funding sources, something that we don't often see elsewhere. American universities often impress foreigners with their abundant facilities and high pay scales.

    Another advantage that American universities enjoy is the chance to be selective. In some countries, such as France for example, all universities are required by law to be open-admissions. Everyone who completes the college-prep secondary course must be admitted to their local university. (That's not true of the much more prestigious grandes ecoles which in some cases are extremely selective.) The most prestigious American schools accept maybe 10% of their applicants and actively seek out the nation's best-and-brightest.

    Place a population of very smart people into excellent facilities, shower them with funding and stimulate them with world-class intellectual excitement, and things take off. It's been a formula for success.

    Of course, many foreign universities can make strong cases for themselves as well. Britain's Cambridge and Oxford, some of the U. of London colleges, the Australian National University down there in the antipodes, and a whole collection of European schools obviously do well too. Japan has several international-class universities and prosperous Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore boast productive schools.

    China is putting a lot of money into building up their universities, but a lot of that effort is catch-up, trying to undo the self-inflicted damage done when they essentially cut their own nation's head off, denouncing, exiling and in some cases simply killing its intellectuals in labor camps. Even today, Chinese universities are still tightly controlled by the all-powerful Party, a situation which will inevitably have a deadening effect on intellectual life. The best-and-brightest Chinese typically want to study abroad, usually in the United States. (Where many of them stay after graduation.)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 4, 2010

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