Not touting a system here (do you want me to count the ways in which I consider the system broken in which I am currently moving?), merely making an observation on cultural and legal differences I find interesting. (I’m a lawyer, an education wonk and working in international student finance).
But insisting that educational hurdles in countries which subsidise higher education more than others exist in order to deliberately and artificially limit the number of students going on to higher education to save their budgets, simply isn’t true and isn’t borne out by the numbers.
And seriously, screening out twice exceptional children is the last thing that’s going to make a financial impact.
@blossom, you’re shifting goal posts here - I’m completely with you on that the ignorance surrounding learning disabilities and dual exceptionalities in most countries which aren’t the US and the UK is scandalous (and trust me, I know whereof I speak).
However, twice exceptional kids are just about the tiniest subset of the student population to use as an example, by definition a fraction of the 2% of students with gifted level IQs - as anecdotal as evidence gets, really. And it’s not as if programs for twice exceptional children are a dime a dozen anywhere, the population is simply too tiny to support a program in all but major cities.
So a student who has an untreated learning disability such as ADHD did not score high enough on a test to get him into his desired school? In most industrialised countries, this would be considered a medical/psychiatric issue first, an educational issue second. In reality, it should be both - but it’s not an issue of funding higher education. (And I am assuming the pharm tech program is a tertiary program the government is at least partially funding, too). And are you sure that none of the students in the US that are kept out of four year colleges because they score below whatever is considered college readiness on the ACT or SAT have an unrecognised and/or untreated learning disability? Please do not get hung up on my using “pass algebra 2” as a metaphor - the idea is that there are hurdles to pass because educational establishments screen by demanding students show their qualifications, all over the world, and it appears to work out, on aggregate, to about similar numbers of college graduates (at least in the current generation) in most industrialised countries. But statistically, in every system, some otherwise deserving students will fall through some crack.
Some students, somewhere in Europe, will be kept out of college or drop out due an untreated learning disability. Some students, somewhere in the US, will too. Some students, somewhere in the US, will be kept out of college or have to drop out due to lack of funds.
Some students, somewhere in Europe, will drop out due to the impersonality and the lack of personal attention at an underfunded, overcrowded public commuter school.
None of which is fair.
However, I posit that any hurdle that has no relevance to the students person but merely to what whatever type of family the student happens to be born into is the most unfair of all.