hello, there are LOADS of great universities outside the US too. Of course you won’t know that from talking to Taiwanese whose first English words seem to Berkeley, UCLA and Stanford.
I come from a small country in Europe. The government pays the fees to go to college (Any college), college entry is competitive. The students work part-time and every summer, often going to different countries to get more cash as getting a student loan is difficult and mom and pop don’t pay for everything. In your third year some students have the option of studying in another European country paid for by the EU.
Times were sometimes tough for me too even though the government paid the fees! Still had fun.
The university I graduated from is over 400 years old and is world famous. It has more famous writers come out of it than you could put together from all the IVY league schools combined. I completed a master’s in another top rated university and paid 3000 dollars for it.
Just illustrating things. We had many kids in my family, we all went to college and my parents and us have no debt. (We do pay 30% tax on average but that’s not really any different from the state of Massachussets for example). I think many Americans are hoodwinked by the rich in saying that Europe is lumbered with huge taxes and that is how we pay for better social services and education. It’s better for the rich to pay lump sums for their children to go to good colleges
than pay a higher percentage of tax on a large income base and then have to compete with bright students for good schools.
At the same time participation of kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds has hardly improved in 3rd level education and is a national disgrace.
I would go across the street and give maths’ grinds to kids who wouldn’t even finish 2nd level education. I agree it’s mostly family attitude and culture which gives you the backing to succeed in getting to and graduating from college.
My conclusion , most European systems are for the middle class, America’s is geared largely towards the rich and nobody’s is for the working class.
I’m glad this topic got away from only the Ivy League.
Are there local city and state colleges in other regions of the world: Europe, Oceania and Australia, or South America as well?
I have found that in the Bay Area, city colleges are for the hands-on, working class people to learn practical skills. The State Colleges and Universities are for the theorists and philosophers or management.
At least in California, and probably other States, anyone can go to school as well to improve their skills or change careers.
I wouldn’t have gotten so riled up if people hadn’t main their main arguments personal attacks accusing me of being a bitter whiner. That type of rebuttal is nothing more than a red herring ad homineum, implying that the only reason anyone would ever criticize the Ivy League would be because they’ve got sour grapes.
A: I think it’s a social tragedy that America has the highest rate of wealth disparity in the developed world. It’s not fair that the rich should have so much while many poor people in America barely scrape by.
B: Awww, life must be so tough for you. You’re just bitter because you’re not rich, LOL I bet you’ll say those grapes smell sour anyway.
C: Do you know what my family went through? I had to live in a duplex! But I managed to make a bundle in stock options and got out before the Enron/World Com collapse. People like you are just jealous.
I think the great thing about America is that almost anyone can get enough (government) student loans to go to whatever school.
I went to Yale, and financed it all through loans and scholarship.
Funny how the instigator of this discussion has beaten a hasty retreat. Ivyleaguenetwork, are you still there? I will decline to join the group at this time (although I’m not in Taiwan right now I’m there pretty often)… The way you phrased your invitation was just too stuck up. Come on, “candidate?”
Haobana, you went to school in Ireland, right? How does the govt. afford to pay for the tuition for all the college students, and how do the schools keep the costs down?
American private schools are soooo friggin expensive. It almost makes it a good reason NOT to have kids. The school I go to charges US$11,000/term just for tuition alone. It gets raised like $500/year or so. A good percentage of the students come from affluent families. You could tell by the cars they drive. There’s so many damn Asians here too!! They probably constitute at least 60% of the campus. I’m going to be in debt forever. Tho interest/passion should matter most over money when choosing a career, I still better make at least US$100K a year after graduation to get my money’s worth or I’ll be extremely pissed!!! Or maybe I’ll just try to marry rich.
quote:Originally posted by thyrdrail:
Haobana, you went to school in Ireland, right? How does the govt. afford to pay for the tuition for all the college students,
the american private college/university system is the best in the world. i’m not trying to slight fine schools in other countries, but the private college system that has developed in the us is pretty amazing.
why are tuition fees so high at all the elite schools? it’s the world’s best “tax” the rich system ever developed. if you’re poor and get into one of those $30k+ top schools, you will get enough grants to pay your way through. if you’re middle class, you will need to make some sacrifices, but there are enough loans available to squeak by. if you notice, all the top schools have 100% of students determined to need financial aid receive 100% of their determined need. if you’re rich, you don’t even think about the $30k and maybe toss in something more when the alumni association comes calling.
just look at the size of some of the endowments these schools have. harvard and yale both have over $10 billion. this money comes from the rich who give it WILLINGLY and a lot of it goes to pay for financial aid for the poor.
contrast that to other countries where the top schools are pretty much dependent on government funds. it’s great that such a high class education is pretty much free, but where does the money come from? isn’t it unfair that joe blow in some working class neighborhood has to pay taxes so that some son of a millionaire can get a free education?
in EVERY country, the top universities will have a disproportinate amount of rich students. i would wager that the socio-economic diversity at top american schools is much better than any other elite schools in the world. and at least in the us, these “rich brats” aren’t having their education paid for by the government.
i think part of the reason private universities have developed this way is the fact that americans have always been very generous in giving money, but they HATE being forced to give it through taxes. by mixing some school pride and a sense that these schools are serving a good cause(educating people no matter their economic background), these schools have amassed resources totally unmatched anywhere else in the world. chew on this, the 4 ivies with the top endowments(harvard, yale, princeton, columbia…they rank 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 9th respectively on the largest endowment list) have over $40 billion combined…which is about half of ireland’s gdp.
quote:Originally posted by BAH:
I think the great thing about America is that almost anyone can get enough (government) student loans to go to whatever school.
I went to Yale, and financed it all through loans and scholarship.
Must be nice. I was accepted there but could not attend due to insufficient financial backing. The year I went to college, the interest rates in the US were like 20% and my parents were not making much money or maybe no money (they didn’t let me know those things) because houses were not selling due to high mortgage rates (my dad was a builder). But the financial aid folks didn’t take that into account.
I suppose you can manage to scrape up enough loans and work-study to go to any school, but you have to ask at what level it makes sense to do so. I went to Georgetown, a (somewhat) cheaper school (with a much better Chinese department – ooh ooh look what THAT did for me! ) which I’m still paying for on student loans, but I think if I’d shelled out more money to go to Yale, I would have a much larger debt and no better education. In the end, I think you can get just as good an education at a state university IF you are aware of what you need to do (and most freshmen in college aren’t) and have an idea of what courses to take regardless of whether or not you personally like them.
How about these folks who mortgage their lives to go to law school, then don’t graduate in the top 20% and fail to get anything like a lucrative job offer? Or (heaven forfend) people who shell out big bucks for an MBA or other graduate degree, only to find out that it does them NO good at all in Taiwan because of people’s hiring prejudices and the employment laws? They’ve still got to pay back those government loans.
not sure how different it used to be, but tuition + room and board at gerogetown now costs more than tuition + room and board at yale. $34.8k vs. $34k. and i think there are many more resources(grants and scholarships from various organizations) available to help students now than there used to be.
quote: think part of the reason private universities have developed this way is the fact that americans have always been very generous in giving money, but they HATE being forced to give it through taxes. by mixing some school pride and a sense that these schools are serving a good cause(educating people no matter their economic background), these schools have amassed resources totally unmatched anywhere else in the world. chew on this, the 4 ivies with the top endowments(harvard, yale, princeton, columbia...they rank 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 9th respectively on the largest endowment list) have over $40 billion combined...which is about half of ireland's gdp.
Great colleges all and I’d love it if they accepted me as a graduate student. If you’re driven and know what you want these colleges are the often the best choice for a good future.
Ireland mostly finances it’s education from Ireland not from Europe. If we can finance it with Euros from Europe more power to us!
Maybe in the future they will reintroduce tuition fees, who knows.
The endowments system is great for universities which are already rich and presitigious in the most wealthy country in the world. I’m sure if I was in the US I would have gone to one of those colleges if I could.
At my college almost all the students were from the middle class. Not many high rollers and few working class heroes.
Is that better , I don’t know. I don’t think my family would have guaranteed loans for 100,000 USDs with a few kids to look after if they had the same jobs in the US. I don’t think we would have been taking foreign holidays too often. My friend is a high school English teacher in New Jersey who went to some Ivy League establishment in Virginia for her education. I’m not sure if the economics of the whole thing were well worked out if you look at the size of the loan she has to repay over the next ten to twenty years. Now she discovered she doesn’t even like being a teacher.
The fact is it matters more what you study than where you study for most jobs these days.
Maybe that’s why I know there are plenty of people from Yale and Harvard teaching here
Thyrdrail is right anyway, at this rate there’ll be nothing but Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans and assorted Asians on US campuses