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What's Wrong With the American University System
ideonexus writes "The Atlantic has an excellent interview with Andrew Hacker — co-author with Claudia Dreifus of a book titled Higher Education? — covering everything that's wrong with the American university system. The discussion ranges from entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching; to 22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position after graduating with six-figures of debt; to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate. It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything I absolutely despised about my college life. Dreifus is active in the comments section of the article as well, lending to a fantastic discussion on the subject."
Fix that first.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University. The ticket sales and merchandising are a HUGE boon for most universities, with little in the way of player salaries to cut into all that phat cash.
And, even if they didn't make money directly, popular sports programs are often a huge draw for the local donors and alumni supporters that keep most universities going. Like it or not, wealthy alumni and locals are a helluva lot more interested in how the football/basketball teams are doing than how many papers Professor Dipschitz published this year, or how much you've improved your graduation rate.
And before a bunch of you non-Americans kick in with snide "handegg" remarks, yes I'm aware that you're "football" is different from ours. But we *are* talking about American universities here.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well, for starters they're operated like for-profit corporations, instead of education institutions
it is likely the best university system in the world.
[citation needed]
What is wrong with the university system is because we've screwed up our high school system to pretty much let -everyone- graduate, a diploma now means nothing. Because of this, people who usually should go to a trade school, or just have on-site training from high school is now attending university to stand out in the job market. So because of this, universities are forced to hire sub par teachers to meet the demand and because no one wants to attend a university with a 60% flunk-out rate, universities lower standards. Of course this is just a cat and mouse game, eventually employers are going to require things beyond a bachelors degree for entry-level jobs, etc.
Fix our high school system by actually -failing- kids who can't do the work. None of this "can I please have extra credit despite me doing nothing but talking in class?" crap that keeps high-profile athletes who are dumber than rocks with "passing" grades.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Name one profession that is _not_ filled with petty politics, sucking up to superiors, back stabbing and arguing over parking spots?
The difference is only academics write a thick book about it.
The summary started out good but:
"They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts".
"The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education."
I'm not saying get rid of liberal arts. They're great. I loved taking them when I got my BSME. I'm probably going to sneak into a few when I go back for my masters. But there is no reason every decent sized school needs to be graduating even 20 theater majors a year. Hurray, you spent 4 years and $50k to learn to do theater. Now what? Most highschools require you to have a teaching degree too. So now you're limited to off broadway and the such. Something tells me that there isn't a huge demand (at least not enough to match supply).
The most successful liberal arts major you'll ever meet was most likely one of your liberal arts professors.
We NEED to be focusing more on vocational training. The world needs ditch diggers. The world also needs mechanics, electricians, welders. We need to quit making high schools force someone who would be an excellent mechanic into going to college 'just because'. Too many parents push their kids into college thinking either "I'm successful, they have to go to be successful too." or "I want my kid to go to college because I didn't to get rich".
Personally I've liked what I read about other countries where they sort of guide you into a track early in high school. I'm sure it's not perfect and they get the track wrong, but it's a ton better than graduating 10,000 students a year from a decent sized education, 50% of which have a degree that is more or less 100% useless. WTF does an "Art Appreciation" major do?
I wish I could go back to my high school and give a swift cock punch to my guidance counselor that told me I couldn't take welding because I was college bound. There is so much stuff I'd love to make. Thankfully my dad taught me wood working and home repair and I learned to solder in an internship.
... and being prohibitively expensive for a large part of the population?
"What's wrong with the American University System" is also what's wrong with any university that i've taught at, (ok, that's just the states and a random sprinkling in Europe). "entrenched tenured profs" -hah- in Germany, they don't even have to get out of bed after tenure. and what 22 year old anywhere has realistic expectations? granted, the american university athletic industry connection is an ugly situation special to america, but the rest is just stating an obvious "problem" with universities since 12th century Bologna (no... not some old lunch meat)
This one puzzled me.
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
These teams not only support themselves, but pour money back into the general university system.
I know, and sometimes agree that there is WAY too emphasis on sports on the college level, over academics, but really...the complaint shouldn't be that it costs them any money, it is quite the opposite!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Blanket statements will get you in trouble.
While it's true that some come out of college with a nasty sense of entitlement for an awesome, high-paying job, not all do. The majority of people that I graduated with surely didn't share that sentiment (probably because they saw how much more I knew than them due to my actual real work experience, vs their school-only experience).
People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
Sorry, but you are making a sweeping and entirely false generalization there. From what I have seen, most of the international students in my engineering program came here because a degree from an American university was perceived as more valuable than a degree from their own country. I saw far more cheating and far less competence among the international students, even those that spoke English fluently, than I did among the American students; they were not going to school because they were seeking a better education than what they could get back home.
Palm trees and 8
Most first world nations have tons of internationals. Up here in Canada at least half my program is international. It's not "America is awesome" it's "My country is not awesome."
Completely agree, despite not wanting to... I did my grad work at Texas A&M (Big 12) and despite how much they continually pay their football coaches and the near deification of the players, the program brought money and prestige to the university. I'd blame 6 and 7 figure incomes of useless administrators more than sports for the astronomical rise in tuition.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Depends on the school. Mine makes money from football, but the money then gets sucked-up by all the other less popular sports like soccer, field hockey, gymnastics, and so on.
Where sports is REALLY a waste is at the High School level. Yeah I know people need exercise, but that's what gym is for. You don't need all those extra afterschool (and expensive) sports teams.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Most any college team I know of (SEC ones in my experience) MAKE the universities money by the barrel full.
Well, you have to beware of creative accounting and bad investments/contracts.
Basically it can sometimes become a 'school pride' issue, because the sports teams 'make' the college money they press for additional benefits - more pay for the coach, more money for recruiting efforts, new stadium, etc...
Of course, all this is justified as 'payoff in X years', the problem is that you never reach X...
On the creative accounting side you end up with sports expenses not being counted as part of the sports programs, things like ticket sales being counted as income even as they count stadium expenses as 'infrastructure' like actual classrooms.
I don't read AC A human right
Liberal Arts is not about Theatre, Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking. This country needs more people who can think before they do, not more doers whose educations become obsolete before the ink on their diploma is dry.
there are many good essays on exactly what Liberal Arts is, you should try reading a few of them before penning ignorant rants.
This is one of them, http://www2.fiu.edu/~hauptli/MyViewofTheNatureofALiberalArtsEducation.html
This is a page that describes the expectations of a student that has graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts (please note that I did not say Theatre or Art Appreciation, those are part of Liberal Arts, but They are not all of Liberal Arts [if you don't understand why this is so, then you should review your logic]).
http://www.evergreen.edu/about/expectations.htm
You know, the schools people come to attend from across the globe? Or perhaps you had a different country in mind?
Harvard University Cambridge, MA, Princeton University Princeton, NJ, Yale University New Haven, CT, California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, Stanford University Stanford, CA, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, Columbia University New York, NY, University of Chicago Chicago, IL, Duke University Durham, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, Northwestern University Evanston, IL, Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO, Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, Cornell University Ithaca, NY, Brown University Providence, RI, Emory University Atlanta, GA, Rice University Houston, TX, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN, University of California--Berkeley Berkeley, CA, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, Georgetown University Washington, DC, University of California--Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA
Most of the time its a HR drone who thinks that PHP is some kind of street name for a drug
PHP is a gateway language, it's easy to start with but before you know it you're hooked on Python, C, Java, and even worse. I get the shakes now if I don't use Perl every few hours. PHP ruined my life man.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
they all acted like they know something we don't.
If you're literally sitting there paying them to teach you something they damn well better know something you don't, otherwise your wasting your money. Also, you've got a bit of a paradox here unless you want someone in the situation to bow down and act like they don't have anymore knowledge than the other party. Someone has to have more knowledge than the other and one would certainly hope it's the person standing at the front of the class being paid to give it out.
Programming, Technical work, Networking, DBA, Whatever you want to do with computers, education doesn't really matter.
This isn't entirely true. Both outside HR and internal HR departments filter the masses of resumes they receive by education. The simple, brain-dead way to filter the vast majority of candidates, and select (on average) better ones is to require either a Masters or a PhD. I wrote quite a diatribe about the stupidity of this practice a month or so ago when this turned up on Slashdot.
So while you still can get a job without a having 4-8 years of higher education in Computer fields, you're going to have to battering-ram through stupid HR screening before you'll get noticed. The 'big' companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and such even lean towards PhD as a minimum bar for entry. That's even more stupid, and you'll find you have trouble even getting a phone interview without a PhD even if you have, say, 10+ years experience in exactly the field they want.
The root cause? Escalation. Everyone who wants to get a programming job is getting a Masters, not even a Bachelors, because employers want that because everyone in the previous generation has a Bachelors. Now employers want a PhD because, well, everyone got a Masters because employers wanted that. What happens when everyone's spent 10 years in education just to get a job? Perhaps, I dunno, people could be recruited on a basis of their quality rather than a piece of paper saying they're as good as a few million other people.
Half of my program is international students. I'm in Canada. So unless they were looking for Maine and wandered a bit far north I'd say that's a bit of a moot point.
http://www.4icu.org/top200/
http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/worlds-best-universities/2010/02/25/worlds-best-universities-top-400
You'll notice that the United States is disproportionately represented. (Effective troll though...)
Lol, could you say that again please? I love how you pronounce "moot."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
>>>I'm in Canada and I pay $900/semester + book costs
False. You are right you are paying $900/semester now, but then you will get a job and you will pay the remaining $80,000 or so in the form of weekly taxation. So in the end, you're paying the same amount as I did in the States...... just spread out over the next 60 years.
It's just the same as I got "free" K-12 education, but now I have to pay ~$6000 a year in school taxes. I am paying-off the education I received several decades ago. It was never free - just a deferred charge. Like buying a sofa at a store with deferred payment. It's free now; but I pay next year.
BTW: Were you really so naive as to not realize this? (Education is not free; it's simply paid later)
If so maybe your education was not that great after all.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Well to be fair, the media constantly bombards us with the message that working an ordinary job makes you a failure of some kind, and that if your life is anything less than glamorous, something is wrong with you. As you note, though, those jobs have to be filled -- the problem is that we keep telling people that they should be avoiding them.
Palm trees and 8
As someone who lived most of his life outside the US, and now teaches outside the US in a University, but got my B.S. in a US University, I say the following:
Pros:
- Flexibility: I LOVE the idea of choosing classes! Great concept, too bad not every system has this
- 1 per class per day: obvious? Great that in the US system you get your 5 hours of math at 1 per day.. not all together!
- Exams not the only consideration: in the US system many techniques are used to evaluate, not just exams
- Focused towards the masses: the US system is less elitist than other systems around the world. Everybody is expected to graduate! (not true in some countries where the graduation rate is at MOST 10%)
- Tough admissions: on the opposite end, you need to compete to get in
- Cheating is considered a capital offence: in some countries it is tolerated far too much
- Options: in large US universities you can study just about anything.. that's cool!
- Alternatives: if you really don't like a class or a teacher, wait till the next semester/quarter
- Quarter system: I love the quarter system. Annual systems stink. Semesters are better but quarter system rules!
Cons:
- Cost
- Cost again
- Tough for foreign students (though I wasn't one)
- Stupid SATs, GREs that measure test preparation and test taking skill more than knowledge
- Hard to sometimes justify the cost (did I mention cost?)
But I often recommend the US System over all others. I honestly think it is the best. (Though I'm biased somewhat)
Ah, but the difference between traveling to other countries and traveling to the US is that you have to go through American airport security. You have to really want to enter the country to voluntarily do that.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking.
No, Liberal Arts is about thinking the way pre-scientific people did it.
Read CP Snow's "Two Cultures", which laments the divide between the sciences and the liberal arts, and justly so.
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc, they have ceased to be what they once were, which is the living voice of Western culture. Instead they are just a cozy backwater for the scientifically illiterate.
The sciences, at the same time, become a cozy backwater for the poetically illiterate.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
But then there's typically a good 30-40 year delay between actual achievement and Nobel prize. Add to that some 10 years worth of doing unnoticed stuff, and then 10- years worth of education, and we can conclude that American universities were awesome in the '50s-'70s.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
If someone truly believes in the principal that one person's production should be forcibly taken and given to someone that an arbitrary authority has decided needs it more then that person should lead by example.
You're arguing from a faulty premise: that of the myth of one person's production.
Anything a person who dwells in civilization produces is the result of a partnership between that person and the society in which they live, without which their production (to some small or large degree) would be either impossible or less. Therefore, logically, the fruits of that production also logically belong in part to that person and in part to society.
It's not about redistributing what's yours; it's about your partner in a venture getting their cut.
It worked well for 150 years.
Did you know that George Washington, for example, taught himself geometry? Back in the days when we had actual education it was understood that any person with the capability to read and access to the correct books could teach himself any skill he was capable of learning.
most employment...
...has been shipped to China.
Thanks for playing, USA.
Your decline won't end in a nice environmentally sustainable hippydom either. Alchys and neglect are your future. Detroit, writ large.
Happy Friday.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
"It never ceases to amaze me how smart people seem to achieve greatness in spite of the many failings of our education system."
The reason for this is quite simple: a diploma gets you in the door, but your particular qualities, if any, pave the way to greatness.
/* soapbox */ in spite of our horrible primary education system. So we have to breed high achievers, American's aren't willing to teach greatness to children any more.. Having spent many of my formative years in Asia I know first hand that the situation exactly is. The issues we have with our primary schools are our real problems. K through 12 aged children come of age in and must excel despite a primary system that frankly teaches them shit about the reality of life and learning in the modern age. Children are indoctrinated into thinking about being accepting of other cultures, "valuing" and fostering their own fragile egos and at the same time that winning isn't really the right thing to strive for and how global warming is a hideous result of modern civilization and all manner of politically correct nonsense, none of which is taught in any other country that I've ever lived in.
Japanese school children on the other hand are given the basic tools of rational and critical thought, drilled constantly to master both mathematical and lexical (language) skills, and everything is done to prepare them for secondary education. Japan has many 2ndary schools, but any Japanese person will tell you that only 3 count; Tokyo, Todai, and a third whose name escapes me. If you are a Japanese citizen of means and you can't get your child into one of those three, that's when you consider sending your child to Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc. And fortunately for those foreign students there's plenty of room because American children are off doing anything but achieving. Foreigners send their children to western schools because they don't have enough room in their own schools.
Meanwhile we're teaching our children to hug trees which they can presumably use to ultimately flip burgers with their liberal arts degrees. Are we really casting a critical enough eye at our primary education system?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
That sounds like an issue with employers then, not universities.
If employers keep asking for ever-increasing qualifications, isn't that an indication that universities aren't providing the right education?
From the article -- "Tuitions now are twice what they were 25 years ago".
Hmm, I started at the University of Texas almost 25 years ago. Tuition has gone up by a factor of *10* since then.
(Seriously -- it was about $400 per semester back then, and now it's over $4000/semester now.)
Back then, I put myself through college. No loans. Not sure that kids could do that now ...
From TFA:
One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts...
..liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later--by the way, in two years rather than four.
Disagree. Engineering classes also allow people to communicate and explore new ideas, the subject matter is simply more practical and concrete (i.e. the correct answer is more narrowly defined). Also, many quality engineering programs have liberal-education requirements for this reason. People pay a lot of money for college, and forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems, it will just further burden them with debt when they go back to "engineering school", or whatever the author is suggesting.
...you even suggest that graduates should work at Old Navy for a year and ruminate on their lives.
In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? ... There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do.
ARE YOU SERIOUS!? I quit reading the article at this point. I worked my ass off in shitty IT jobs over the last 7 years, double majored in 5 years, and this guy want me to go fold shirts or flip burgers?! I didn't expect (and don't have) a fat salary, but I do well enough to be comfortably middle-class at age 24, doing work that I somewhat enjoy. Also, there is a "rush", its called interest on my student loans.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
Yes yes and when my lung collapsed I didn't actual get "free healthcare" because my taxes are slightly higher than yours. I would rather have higher taxes and the services whenever I need them then not be able to attend a good university because my family lives on one civil servant's income. You disagree, whatever. I'm not having a socialism/libertarianism debate.
Football (and athletics in general) are not causing tuition to skyrocket. As much as I wish it were so, the numbers just don't add up. For example, tuition has also skyrocketed at schools (like mine) that don't even have football teams.
I think the cause is even simpler. The problem is, no one wants to talk about it because there is no easy, feel-good solution.
Thesis: The raise in tuition rates over the last 40 years or so is largely due to the easy availability of *cheap student loans.*
I don't think this should be particularly controversial: It is a logical outcome completely consistent with classical supply/demand economics.
Let's say the government prints money and starts giving it away. Everyone is richer, right? Wrong, of course -- that money is now worth less, so prices all go up. That's inflation. This is the same scenario, except that the money can only be used for one specific purpose: education. It should logically follow that the price of that education will simply go up correspondingly.
I'm not going to propose any solutions, because I don't want to start some stupid partisan flamewar. I just want to suggest that the widely perceived *solution* to high education costs is actually the *driver* of those costs.
- AJ
EDIT: Just found this:
"The simple economics of student loan crises"
http://dmarron.com/2009/09/15/the-simple-economics-of-student-loan-crises/
For the reason I actually stated. it has the most well known schools therefore the most well peer reviewed schools therefore the highest score. It's like how Megan Fox/Christina Hendricks are not actually the most attractive women in the world but will always win the polls because the majority of the contestants aren't well known enough to compete. And either way it's the system as a whole that's under scrutiny, not the individual Schools. I'm not denying you have some very nice schools. It's the concept that your system as a whole is superior.
Education is only important to things you don't like. If you are truly interested in a field you'll learn these things on your own; often better than can be taught. Otherwise you are just forcing an education due to it feeling required.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
You know, before I went to university, I thought the exact same thing. What's in it for me? I'm a smart guy, have a high IQ, know a lot. I'm generally smarter than many people who've graduated university. So why do employers insist on a post-secondary degree or diploma to hire for certain positions?
Then I went to university. Shortly after I got in, my world view got blown the fuck up. There are a lot of important lessons that I've learned in university.
Humility, respect, and perspective were the first to come. Most of us here were probably at the top of our graduating classes in high school in practically every subject. But once you get into a good university that requires you to take different courses (mine requires at least one full year course or equivalent in each of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Sciences), while you may excel in your own particular field of study, you'll also start to realize that people in other fields of study are equally impressive in their reasoning and knowledge. You'll also start to realize that your interests and expertise do not encompass the world, and that the world is a lot bigger than we tend to give it credit for. People are more intellectually diverse, and that diversity does not mean that they are intellectually inferior. You gain a lot of perspective.
Your social skills will also improve if you choose to engage in campus social life. Once you get past high school and into university, it seems like most people just press a social reset button. Gone are candies and nerds and other cliques, everyone's just a student. You'll quickly learn the benefits of networking, especially with those people with interests outside of your own, both as a social support mechanism as well as for professional purposes. If you're in the sciences, you'll often find yourself having to work with other people and improving your co-operation and leadership skills, two skills that are key to your professional success.
Individual work ethics and research skills will also be developed. You learn that there's a lot more to research than Wikipedia (your ass will swiftly be kicked if you try to use it as anything other than a quick overview/starting point). Your post-secondary institution will grant you unlimited access to many research portals, where you can find papers on practically any field of human knowledge. If you do well in university, your employer will know that you've had experience doing a lot of individual research and with strict deadlines approaching. Having good time management skills, self-control, and generally good work ethics are also key to being a good employee.
Then there's the actual knowledge. I can't personally speak to computer programming/science/engineering, but I do have a friend who graduated with a BSc in Software Engineering. He's told me over the years that he's really learned a lot about programming and software engineering from the school. Software engineering in particular requires you to be open minded and have different perspectives on possible solutions. He learned how to look at the problem from different angles, and different ways to attack similar problems. From my own view, there can really be no replacement for the knowledge I've gained in the past few years at this school. In fact, if I never attended this school, I wouldn't even have known that I was interested in what I'm doing right now, philosophy.
That's only a few of the many things that I can easily put into words about my experience in university. I've experienced and learned so much more, but I wouldn't have the time, nor the words in many instances, to write about them here. The catch is that you have to be willing to learn. You have to open your mind and look at university as a whole life learning experience. I know many people who just come to school in order to get that piece of paper that will get them a better chance at a job. Some of those people end up realizing the social and educational potential of the university experience at-large, but most of them learn n
Here's the example of the number one thing wrong with the US higher education system: misunderstanding of the purpose of the "higher education system".
Universities are supposed to be places where people get a well-rounded education in a wide array of topics. That's why the undergraduate degrees tend to have liberal arts and science and social studies components to them. The result is supposed to be people who can look at the world and have some understanding of where we are and where we are going.
If you want a technical degree, go to a community college or trade school. You should not be looking to the Universities to provide well-trained mechanics.
The fact that tenure was listed as a fault is another sign of that same misunderstanding. Universities are also intended to further the arts through research. Tenure is a means of allowing faculty to relax a bit from having to deal with the daily grind and let them explore areas that aren't necessarily the most productive now -- but may become so. "Ok, you've shown you can produce papers and teach, now be inventive."
It's no different than Google's "free friday", or whatever company it was that gave employees work-time to do personal projects.
no, what's wrong here in the US is that people EXPECT that simply throwing some money at an institution and attending some classes and doing the old pump-and-dump method of test taking is a RIGHT for all those graduating from lower education levels.
Living in a town with a major state university, it is appalling how basically stupid and ignorant of the real world most students at this university are.
The american student has basically been conned into believing that attendance of higher education is mandatory, yet at the same time is basically just a way to postpone entering the working force for a minimum of four years (and more likely 5-6 for that 4 year degree) and continue to act as a child while amassing a huge debt load for which the government is happy to keep taking their interest payments for the next 20 years.
it's pathetic actually.
The fascinating thing is that the result of the American system, where apparently one is taught to hug trees (according to you) is that Americans are impermeable to the reality of global warming, whereas in the rest of the world, everyone is pretty much convinced...
From which we must conclude that the system is so disastrous it can't even indoctrinate properly.
The first poll is crap. The popularity of a university's web page have no bearing on the quality of its education and research performed. Until recently most German universities added their web pages as an afterthought and they were maintained by some IT admin sitting in a basement. I know that from first hand source having a friend working as IT admin at the University of Heidelberg. Having graduated there I always found its abysmally bad web presence a constant source of embarrassment.
There are some objective polls measuring research effectiveness using solid and well defined measures. And as one would expect the top tier well funded US research universities have a strong showing.
Yet, there is no strict correlation between good research and good education. Scanning the rankings listed in the related wikipedia entry does not show anything equivalent to the PISA effort for college level education.
The US does dismal in the PISA rankings despite of course the existence of some outstanding private and public high schools. In the same vein the fact that the US hosts a good dozen of the best research universities tells us little to nothing of how the gross of the US colleges are holding up in international comparison. The only thing we can be certain off is that it costs much more than in many other places to get an advanced degree (i.e. Canada, Europe).
You know, you can buy on amazon for cheap excellent book on general relativity and quantum mechanics. My bet is that without a couple years in a good physics program you will no actually understand anything.
Because (advanced) maths are not simple. Because the level of abstraction reached is mind-boggling. Because these books build on centuries of maths and physics knowledge.
Now you can, perhaps, teach yourself to that level. It will take you probably more time than the college/university path. It is cute that you compare the level of education of Washington to today: basically, in his time, you could essentially know everything.
Now go read some articles on Riemanian manifolds on wikipedia. That's modern geometry for you. Go ahead. Teach yourself that.
And the UK has Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen and St Andrews, all within what would be a small US state, and all in the same division as the first few on the list.. France has La Sorbonne. And so on. Yes, the USA has world-class universities, but so do lots of other places. It doesn't make the USA system the "best". (I've only heard of about two-thirds of the universities on your list by the way. I could name quite a few universities in the UK that "people come to attend from across the globe" but that are not so famous on the world stage, too.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ "The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
See my other post in this thread, too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738326&cid=33090340
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That's funny, because somehow the people graduating with these "free" degrees are ending up with over $20,000 in debt. Perhaps phrases like "most part" and "free" don't mean what one of us thinks they mean.
Unfortunately, "better schools" are rated as such because their students score higher. That convolutes the data - the teachers may be equal at both schools, but one may be in a wealthier community and the students brought up by parents who emphasized education, while the other may be inner-city whose parents are less hands on and possibly not college graduates. Having gone to the former school, I can tell you that approximately half the school - the ones who were in district - scored very well on the SATs, ACTs and AP exams (no IB available), whereas the other half were bused in from nearby 'inner city' schools and did just as poorly at my school as they did at their district school.
Of course, there were exceptions. I can name them, because there were only 7 out of the 1200 students who were bused in that took it upon themselves to take honors or AP-level classes. The rest were content to stay in the lowest level offered. Additionally, there was a 25% dropout rate for bused in students, compared to a 2% dropout rate for in-district students.
A police history on crimes committed at school showed a disproportionate number of serious incidents (stabbing, drug dealing, gang fights, etc.) from the bussed in students, whereas the in-district population contributed less than 5% of these crimes.
Clearly, your experience and mine differ significantly. I support allowing students who have proven interest in a better education being brought in at taxpayer cost to a better school so they can be surrounded by equally driven peers, but bringing in large numbers of underprivileged students does not improve their education. They are still surrounded by the same group of people, and nothing changes. There is sufficient data beyond my personal anecdote (and of course, now that I'm looking for it it's nowhere to be found) to back up my claims.
Don't forget that schools are rated by student performance, and there is a LOT that goes into student performance beyond teacher quality. It mostly comes from the students. You can take a 'poor person' out of an inner city school, but if they're not inclined to an education, you can put them in any school you want and they still won't get one.