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On September 24 2011 03:57 Wuster wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2011 01:59 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 24 2011 01:54 meadbert wrote:
American Universities are really International Universities located in America. There are a ton of students from other countries.
My hall Freshman year had 9 kids including kids from Peru, Taiwan, Thailand and Pakistan.
In grad school the diversity only increases. That's an interesting note. I didn't know there were so many international students. There's a ton of international students, even at the public universities (I went to UCLA). Despite them paying a huge tuition (I played less than 1/5 of what they did being from California) there's enough that whenever I go abroad I'll meet at least one person who knows someone at UCLA. Not to mention that people abroad have even heard of my public school tells you it's fairly international. As someone else mentioned, America has been a haven for war torn Europe in the first half the 20th Century, but even in the 2nd half the 20th Century, America continued to receive intellectuals from Eastern Europe (Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel walked across the Hungarian-Austrian border for example). Not to mention the Asian intellectuals from S. Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan while those countries rebuilt from WW2 and lingering political reasons (S. Korea and Taiwan weren't always democracies and China had that entire civil war and other things of course). Show nested quote +On September 24 2011 03:40 silverstone12 wrote:On September 24 2011 01:45 paralleluniverse wrote:
However, this has always struck me as paradoxical, because America has the best universities in the world -- by far. Nearly all of the top ranked universities are American. No other country is even *remotely* close.
? i am fairly sure the best university in the world is English Granted, Oxford and Edinburgh will make any list of top universities, but so would every single Ivy League University, which is why he said 'nearly all' and 'the best universities' plural. Edit: Looks like I'm late to this party, Edinburgh seems to jump up and down these lists and for some reason I keep thinking Oxford and Cambridge are two sides of the same school (boy is that not the case).
not every ivy. cornell, brown, dartmouth are nothing like harvard, yale, princeton, columbia, upenn.
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There are plenty of really good high schools in America. And frankly, how good can a high school be?
Honestly, the quality of a school is pretty much just it's location (factoring in the quality of living in that location). The place where I'm from, the public schools were all very good. But if I drive to a certain part of downtown, there are tons of "bad" schools, which, not coincidentally, happen to be where the low-income housing is.
Basically, if you're rich, you won't be affected by the "bad" education system in America. (I don't mean filthy rich, I mean like upper-middle class or even middle-class.)
It's really hard to improve those bad schools because the kids just aren't living in an environment outside of school that is conducive to learning. Of course, there will be some exceptions in kids that have a lot of determination and passion for learning, but those are typically outliers.
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On September 24 2011 04:05 KimJongChill wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2011 03:57 Wuster wrote:On September 24 2011 01:59 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 24 2011 01:54 meadbert wrote:
American Universities are really International Universities located in America. There are a ton of students from other countries.
My hall Freshman year had 9 kids including kids from Peru, Taiwan, Thailand and Pakistan.
In grad school the diversity only increases. That's an interesting note. I didn't know there were so many international students. There's a ton of international students, even at the public universities (I went to UCLA). Despite them paying a huge tuition (I played less than 1/5 of what they did being from California) there's enough that whenever I go abroad I'll meet at least one person who knows someone at UCLA. Not to mention that people abroad have even heard of my public school tells you it's fairly international. As someone else mentioned, America has been a haven for war torn Europe in the first half the 20th Century, but even in the 2nd half the 20th Century, America continued to receive intellectuals from Eastern Europe (Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel walked across the Hungarian-Austrian border for example). Not to mention the Asian intellectuals from S. Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan while those countries rebuilt from WW2 and lingering political reasons (S. Korea and Taiwan weren't always democracies and China had that entire civil war and other things of course). On September 24 2011 03:40 silverstone12 wrote:On September 24 2011 01:45 paralleluniverse wrote:
However, this has always struck me as paradoxical, because America has the best universities in the world -- by far. Nearly all of the top ranked universities are American. No other country is even *remotely* close.
? i am fairly sure the best university in the world is English Granted, Oxford and Edinburgh will make any list of top universities, but so would every single Ivy League University, which is why he said 'nearly all' and 'the best universities' plural. Edit: Looks like I'm late to this party, Edinburgh seems to jump up and down these lists and for some reason I keep thinking Oxford and Cambridge are two sides of the same school (boy is that not the case). not every ivy. cornell, brown, dartmouth are nothing like harvard, yale, princeton, columbia, upenn.
I think its a bit of a stretch to say those 3 are "nothing" like them as those 3 are still pretty highly ranked.
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What you are seeing OP is the difference between a school run by a market, which has profound economic incentives to win customers over, and a school run by the government and a board of bureaucrats who spend more time protecting their own asses and lobbying the government and the people for more money instead of actually improving the level of education that children are receiving.
The solution to fixing public schools is elegantly simple, but something the teacher's unions would never let happen over their dead bodies:
You take all the money that the federal and local governments are giving to school and school boards, and you instead give that money to parents in the form of vouchers that they can use to send their kids to school. You could even set up a progressive way of distributing the money, with a higher percentage for low income families as opposed to high income, I'm sure the TL left-wingers would love that.
The point now is that the PARENTS have the money and the control, they can decide where to spend that money and where to send their kids to school. Now the schools have the normal market incentives that any business in the world has, to improve the quality of their product and cut costs, and they have to face COMPETITION. When you have a monopoly on education, of course the quality of education is going to be shit. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that. Put the choice in the hands of parents and make the schools compete to improve the education children receive. Problem solved overnight.
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On September 24 2011 04:00 ToxNub wrote:If you had gone to an American university you would know this isn't a paradox. 
Yeah well, most of my peers at PENN (not penn state  ) were american but none them studied at a public school.. so yeah it isn't a paradox.
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On September 24 2011 04:05 KimJongChill wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2011 03:57 Wuster wrote:On September 24 2011 01:59 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 24 2011 01:54 meadbert wrote:
American Universities are really International Universities located in America. There are a ton of students from other countries.
My hall Freshman year had 9 kids including kids from Peru, Taiwan, Thailand and Pakistan.
In grad school the diversity only increases. That's an interesting note. I didn't know there were so many international students. There's a ton of international students, even at the public universities (I went to UCLA). Despite them paying a huge tuition (I played less than 1/5 of what they did being from California) there's enough that whenever I go abroad I'll meet at least one person who knows someone at UCLA. Not to mention that people abroad have even heard of my public school tells you it's fairly international. As someone else mentioned, America has been a haven for war torn Europe in the first half the 20th Century, but even in the 2nd half the 20th Century, America continued to receive intellectuals from Eastern Europe (Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel walked across the Hungarian-Austrian border for example). Not to mention the Asian intellectuals from S. Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan while those countries rebuilt from WW2 and lingering political reasons (S. Korea and Taiwan weren't always democracies and China had that entire civil war and other things of course). On September 24 2011 03:40 silverstone12 wrote:On September 24 2011 01:45 paralleluniverse wrote:
However, this has always struck me as paradoxical, because America has the best universities in the world -- by far. Nearly all of the top ranked universities are American. No other country is even *remotely* close.
? i am fairly sure the best university in the world is English Granted, Oxford and Edinburgh will make any list of top universities, but so would every single Ivy League University, which is why he said 'nearly all' and 'the best universities' plural. Edit: Looks like I'm late to this party, Edinburgh seems to jump up and down these lists and for some reason I keep thinking Oxford and Cambridge are two sides of the same school (boy is that not the case). not every ivy. cornell, brown, dartmouth are nothing like harvard, yale, princeton, columbia, upenn.
True, but there's Caltech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley (varies in ranking, but rankings heavy on research place it VERY highly, similarly UCLA and UCSD)...
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On September 24 2011 04:11 jdseemoreglass wrote:
What you are seeing OP is the difference between a school run by a market, which has profound economic incentives to win customers over, and a school run by the government and a board of bureaucrats who spend more time protecting their own asses and lobbying the government and the people for more money instead of actually improving the level of education that children are receiving.
The solution to fixing public schools is elegantly simple, but something the teacher's unions would never let happen over their dead bodies:
You take all the money that the federal and local governments are giving to school and school boards, and you instead give that money to parents in the form of vouchers that they can use to send their kids to school. You could even set up a progressive way of distributing the money, with a higher percentage for low income families as opposed to high income, I'm sure the TL left-wingers would love that.
The point now is that the PARENTS have the money and the control, they can decide where to spend that money and where to send their kids to school. Now the schools have the normal market incentives that any business in the world has, to improve the quality of their product and cut costs, and they have to face COMPETITION. When you have a monopoly on education, of course the quality of education is going to be shit. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that. Put the choice in the hands of parents and make the schools compete to improve the education children receive. Problem solved overnight.
Okay, let's say we do that for a second. And let's just give an example with 5 schools.
They go in order, ABCDE. A being awesome, E being shit.
A naturally gets flooded with invites. The progressive society we are, we give more money to the poor, and A is filled with underprivileged kids.
Can parents buy more vouchers? Because the rich parents wouldn't stand for their kids going to a school that's inferior to another one, that a bunch of poor kids are going to. They'll schmooze or bribe, or basically try to create incentives for the great teachers from school A, to go to B, or C.
You'll also have a lot that you'll have to deal with in terms of crowding. If all are equal, and still mandatory, how would you decide where to stop letting students in?
Sure, let the market decide how much each school charges to take kids in, but what you'll basically have is parents will use their whole voucher to get their kids into school, OR, if you can buy additional vouchers, rich people will basically crowd out the poor people and we'll have a situation even worse than we have right now
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On September 24 2011 04:07 Slaughter wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2011 04:05 KimJongChill wrote:On September 24 2011 03:57 Wuster wrote:On September 24 2011 01:59 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 24 2011 01:54 meadbert wrote:
American Universities are really International Universities located in America. There are a ton of students from other countries.
My hall Freshman year had 9 kids including kids from Peru, Taiwan, Thailand and Pakistan.
In grad school the diversity only increases. That's an interesting note. I didn't know there were so many international students. There's a ton of international students, even at the public universities (I went to UCLA). Despite them paying a huge tuition (I played less than 1/5 of what they did being from California) there's enough that whenever I go abroad I'll meet at least one person who knows someone at UCLA. Not to mention that people abroad have even heard of my public school tells you it's fairly international. As someone else mentioned, America has been a haven for war torn Europe in the first half the 20th Century, but even in the 2nd half the 20th Century, America continued to receive intellectuals from Eastern Europe (Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel walked across the Hungarian-Austrian border for example). Not to mention the Asian intellectuals from S. Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan while those countries rebuilt from WW2 and lingering political reasons (S. Korea and Taiwan weren't always democracies and China had that entire civil war and other things of course). On September 24 2011 03:40 silverstone12 wrote:On September 24 2011 01:45 paralleluniverse wrote:
However, this has always struck me as paradoxical, because America has the best universities in the world -- by far. Nearly all of the top ranked universities are American. No other country is even *remotely* close.
? i am fairly sure the best university in the world is English Granted, Oxford and Edinburgh will make any list of top universities, but so would every single Ivy League University, which is why he said 'nearly all' and 'the best universities' plural. Edit: Looks like I'm late to this party, Edinburgh seems to jump up and down these lists and for some reason I keep thinking Oxford and Cambridge are two sides of the same school (boy is that not the case). not every ivy. cornell, brown, dartmouth are nothing like harvard, yale, princeton, columbia, upenn. I think its a bit of a stretch to say those 3 are "nothing" like them as those 3 are still pretty highly ranked.
Ah yeah, exaggerated a bit. I was thinking more along the lines of college rankings haha.
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On September 24 2011 01:45 paralleluniverse wrote:
I'm not from America, but I've heard a lot about how much the American public school system sucks, both from Americans and others.
However, this has always struck me as paradoxical, because America has the best universities in the world -- by far. Nearly all of the top ranked universities are American. No other country is even *remotely* close.
How is it possible for America to, allegedly, have such horribly bad and ineffective schools, while having the best universities in the world?
To add to this, countries like Singapore, China, Korea, and most Asian countries, are generally consider to have the best schools in the world, with the highest level of school achievements measured by standardized language, math, and science scores, yet none of these countries have a university worth a damn, I think none these even have a university ranked in the top 20.
Anyone want to shred some light on this seeming paradox?
United Kingdom has universities which equal/surpass USA universities, after all Harvard was modelled after Cambridge and Oxford, cannot beat the original.
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On September 24 2011 04:11 s4life wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2011 04:00 ToxNub wrote:If you had gone to an American university you would know this isn't a paradox. Yeah well, most of my peers at PENN (not penn state ) were american but none them studied at a public school.. so yeah it isn't a paradox.
That's more of an East Coast situation though. Out on the West Coast most kids do go to public K-12, granted some of those public schools are charter/magnet programs but those are still public. For sure most of my college peers went to schools in affluent areas, but that's to be expected no?
The real thing about America that people don't realize is just how big the wealth gap is, and just how rural parts of the country can be (I can dig up some articles about some communities that still don't have running water or where they survive on subsistence hunting/farming if you like).
On September 24 2011 04:25 KimJongChill wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2011 04:07 Slaughter wrote:On September 24 2011 04:05 KimJongChill wrote:On September 24 2011 03:57 Wuster wrote:On September 24 2011 01:59 paralleluniverse wrote:On September 24 2011 01:54 meadbert wrote:
American Universities are really International Universities located in America. There are a ton of students from other countries.
My hall Freshman year had 9 kids including kids from Peru, Taiwan, Thailand and Pakistan.
In grad school the diversity only increases. That's an interesting note. I didn't know there were so many international students. There's a ton of international students, even at the public universities (I went to UCLA). Despite them paying a huge tuition (I played less than 1/5 of what they did being from California) there's enough that whenever I go abroad I'll meet at least one person who knows someone at UCLA. Not to mention that people abroad have even heard of my public school tells you it's fairly international. As someone else mentioned, America has been a haven for war torn Europe in the first half the 20th Century, but even in the 2nd half the 20th Century, America continued to receive intellectuals from Eastern Europe (Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel walked across the Hungarian-Austrian border for example). Not to mention the Asian intellectuals from S. Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan while those countries rebuilt from WW2 and lingering political reasons (S. Korea and Taiwan weren't always democracies and China had that entire civil war and other things of course). On September 24 2011 03:40 silverstone12 wrote:On September 24 2011 01:45 paralleluniverse wrote:
However, this has always struck me as paradoxical, because America has the best universities in the world -- by far. Nearly all of the top ranked universities are American. No other country is even *remotely* close.
? i am fairly sure the best university in the world is English Granted, Oxford and Edinburgh will make any list of top universities, but so would every single Ivy League University, which is why he said 'nearly all' and 'the best universities' plural. Edit: Looks like I'm late to this party, Edinburgh seems to jump up and down these lists and for some reason I keep thinking Oxford and Cambridge are two sides of the same school (boy is that not the case). not every ivy. cornell, brown, dartmouth are nothing like harvard, yale, princeton, columbia, upenn. I think its a bit of a stretch to say those 3 are "nothing" like them as those 3 are still pretty highly ranked. Ah yeah, exaggerated a bit. I was thinking more along the lines of college rankings haha.
I like to make fun of Brown too, but realistically it's pretty highly ranked.
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The public school system is not that bad. Many people say it is terrible because it could be much, much better, and I would agree. However, I disagree with people who promote drastic change at the risk of losing what we have.
For the most part, the reason people in America think the school system is bad is because they have grown to believe that it is solely the school system's irresponsibility to educate our kids. Thus, irresponsible and lazy parents absolve themselves of all responsibility and then complain about the school system. On the other hand, responsible parents create responsible and well educated children who go on to do great things at our universities.
Really with all the money put into education, any child could get a remarkable education.It's up to the child and parent to make that happen.
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It is ironic that a topic about the "bad school system" gets a first page that drowns in mistakes.
Normally I would not complain as someone who is not a native speaker and is kinda relaxed on the topic. But this time it is really bad.
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However, this has always struck me as paradoxical, because America has the best universities in the world -- by far. Nearly all of the top ranked universities are American. No other country is even *remotely* close.
The people who make these rankings are inept writers of American newspapers/sites, what did you think they'd do?
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On September 24 2011 04:39 Doppelganger wrote:
It is ironic that a topic about the "bad school system" gets a first page that drowns in mistakes.
Normally I would not complain as someone who is not a native speaker and is kinda relaxed on the topic. But this time it is really bad.
care to elaborate?
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On September 24 2011 04:39 Doppelganger wrote:
It is ironic that a topic about the "bad school system" gets a first page that drowns in mistakes.
Normally I would not complain as someone who is not a native speaker and is kinda relaxed on the topic. But this time it is really bad.
Well, hopefully you've noticed by now that the first page of any thread is usually the worst. You will always find the most one-liners there and simplistic arguments. I guess mostly because people who post the fastest are not thinking as hard about their responses, it's more like an immediate reaction. Also, some people just like being the first to post, even if they really don't have anything quality to say
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First of all, in my opinion, the best Universities are ones that can teach better and take a student with very little and train him to be amazing.
The Ivy League schools have a bias in whom they accept, they already accept students that were phenomenal beforehand and have the drive already -- basically they take really good students and the end result is good academic work. However, money is also an issue at a school that relies on such prestige and therefore you have a social economic bias as well which also influences education and attainment.
I had a colleague in highschool that got accepted to Harvard and went -- he was not even the brightest we had but he could definitely afford it whereas others cannot.
I'd say the success of those schools is on the brand name -- the prestige associated with "Yale" or "Harvard" and if you look at specializations, those schools are not #1 for many programs and student success.
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http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
That's a lot of money spent per student for elementary and secondary schools. Do you really think more needs to be spent per year to get them a good education? I think the best and brightest that want to teach become college professors. They go through a much more rigorous hiring process than a k-12 teacher does and more is expected of them.
That number is on average for the country, remember that each individual state decides the budget for education in their state. New Jersey spends $14,000 per student while Arizona spends $6,000.
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In my experience, it seems a large part of it is standards. The minimum standards needed to pass in america are much lower than in other countries. However, there really are no maximum standards. By that I mean, nothing is certain to get you anything. As a result, the top students are always in competition. Pretty much no university will have any criterion which, assuming you have it, you are certain to get in. At least, not for graduate school. Then, a significant portion of students are international students, meaning they as well as the domestic students are competing globally and forced to be even more impressive.
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On September 24 2011 02:49 YeahScience wrote:
I've been in the American public school system my entire life, went to a community college for 2 years before transferring to a state school. I graduated with a science degree and I'm looking to apply to a graduate school this fall. I'd have to say that in general, American colleges are less impressive than foreign ones at the undergraduate level. The students from foreign colleges seem more prepared for tests and have the best knowledge of the subject they're studying.
That's because you went to bad schools in the US. Community college to a state school (and I'm betting it's not Berkeley or UVA)? Sorry to break it to you, but at least there's still a chance for you to get into a good graduate school.
The only universities that can compete with the top US ones (HYPSM. No, not UPenn or Columbia, they are quite good but not HYPSM level.) are Oxford and Cambridge. No, not UCL or LSE. We're talking overall prestige. Next tier is 5-20, and drawing from US News, ARWU, THE, and QS, it's schools like the rest of the Ivys, UChicago, Duke, Johns Hopkins, CalTech, Berkeley, UCLA, etc.
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On September 24 2011 03:11 ThaZenith wrote:
Whatever anyone says, it's almost purely because of the length of the school year for American kids. Something like 30% less days, and a summer break so long kids forget everything they learned.
With more days and better managed breaks, they'd be fine.
This would be an awesome point, except the American colleges have longer summer vacations and even fewer days than high schools, yet they do well.
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EPT
