Well, student debt is a big deal. It’s causing Millenials (Zennials? Whatever they’re called these days) to really have trouble saving up (for a house, retirement, marriage, kids, a bunch of stuff):
That depends on whether the number of slots are kept the same or expanded.
Germany will never make military spending a priority again, and will remain extremely reticent about putting up troops to invade other countries. Germans have had it literally bombed out of them. It is what it is.
NATO is not a partnership of equals. It’s the US, a bit of Britain, and the rest, that’s how the US wants it and it is reflected in spending. If European countries were to up their spending but at the same time asserting more military independence, the US would have something to say about it.
I have heard the same trope about medical spending, or educational spending…that Germany can spend so much because they don’t have to spend so much on the military.
Nope. Spending on social programs, education and health as a proportion of GDP dwarfs military spending, rerouting money there would barely made a dent. Again, it’s cultural reasons that inform the priorities, just as in the US.
And the proportions of GDP spent on health and education are actually much bigger in the US (twice as big in the case of health, haven’t education at my fingertips, I think it’s a factor of 1.5) but it’s private spending, the benefits of which accrue to the individuals that actually spend it, such as 300k in college tuition vs free. And that’s how Americans want it.
I know I won’t be able to persuade anyone who wants to believe the tropes. But if Americans are being ripped off by anyone, it’s not other countries.
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Yes, I haven’t found as huge a list of study-abroad programs at any other college. The privates can’t match the quantity because they’re much smaller and most state schools don’t seem to have put together nearly as many as UIUC.
This does bring to mind what you said about state schools being more threadbare, though. It certainly seems as if publics (outside of a few publics like UMich, which actually has a decent amount of money, but also realized sooner than most other publics that the state funding well would run dry in the near future because of the troubles the auto industry had in the '80’s so they started doing more private-school-type marketing/alumni outreach efforts earlier) don’t seem to put as much money/energy in to marketing as the elite privates do. I don’t know if it’s funds or savvy or what. But for instance, unlike many LACs, there doesn’t seem to be much marketing of UIUC’s expansive and affordable list of study-abroad offerings outside the uni (at least on the web). And while the Ivy-equivalent I went to plays up any celebrity as an alum, you can read an interview of someone who gushed about her time at UIUC, then search the web and find zero UIUC marketing literature that even mentions that person was an alum.
It’s a new day and age. If there is a combined European military, the US actually may be fine with it so long as it doesn’t ally with Russia (pretty unlikely) or China (hard to imagine now, though I suppose nobody can predict the future). Even with the French leading it (which the French would want). Though such a combined force may well fall apart.
I will say this as kindly as possible. You really need to stop assuming you understand topics better than everyone else here. I would never dream of claiming the vast expertise you claim across so many topics, but some of us understand specific topics in more detail than you do.
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You seem to think that the second statement contradicts the first. It does not. Both can be true at once.
The people who believe the “tropes” include the last three Presidents. But what do they know?
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You do not seem to understand what I am calling the trope here.
What do US presidents know? That they want their NATO partners to spend more on defense. That’s not a trope, that a desire being expressed, in order to improve collective action. A perfectly legitimate desire, too.
So what’s the trope? One could say the idea that the US government would actually spend less on defense if it were to happen is a trope - they could to do so now if they really thought they were exclusively spending it in the interests of other countries (note the operative word „exclusively“). But might happen, any president could promise to do so. (Have they?)
No, the one ridiculous trope trotted up is that this is what is keeping the US from introducing European style social programs, such as universal healthcare, universal preschool etc. If you actually believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you…
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Perhaps more relevant than their military spending is the efficiency of their educational system. Reasonably rigorous high schools, followed by focused tertiary education for those who need it, seems to work quite well compared to our system in which vast numbers get inferior academics in both high school and college and must pursue a grad degree. As an example, a physical therapist in the UK attends courses for 3 years post high school, and is then employed. In the US, it is 7 years, with attendant costs and often debt. I do not think our system produces better PT, or even better citizens, than theirs. Just a lot more waste.
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Perhaps it’s relevant in the following sense:
We don’t know (or at least aren’t close to have a consensus on) how to prioritize our spending, whether within the educational system itself or across different areas. I agree that we can’t do things efficiently anymore, whether in defense or in education.
As far as I know, European universities do not provide remedial education, the kind OP is offering to some of her students. If remediation is needed, it is acquired elsewhere, not utilizing the expensive resources of a research university. Students are studying there for a specific purpose and goal. Yet those countries have better educational results and greater social mobility than here, where many colleges are just high school extensions.
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Let me just throw out here, to maybe finish up the military spending sidetrack, that US troops invaded Germany as enemies and occupiers, and whether they are staying or leaving, the troops will be doing it as allies and friends, despite all the wariness that a hegemon government like the US will have to contend with everywhere, and the particular wariness they have to contend with in Germany concerning nuclear armament in the country and military action abroad .
I always think that is a very beautiful thing and one that, again despite all the wariness about getting involved with the hegemon’s military interests in the future, is something to be always grateful for!
Ah, now I understand your point.
To that my response is that there is not widespread electoral support for the tax rates required to pay for the social safety net that European countries provide. I certainly do believe that the US spends its healthcare dollars inefficiently, so that is low hanging fruit if we have the political will. But when it comes to other matters, the US is not interested in funding Sweden-like benefits such as its 390 days of paid parental leave.
It’s important to understand that countries can have different ways to be successful, and adopting other countries model in a wholesale way may not work well.
The US model for success is quite different from the European model of success. The US model is based upon allowing people to keep a larger percentage of what they earn. This encourages entrepreneurship, immigration of skilled people, and advanced financial services. The result s that the USA has a considerably higher median income than Europe as a whole (you will find some European countries do better than the USA, but then again, you will find some states in the USA that do even better). It also has generally lower housing and food costs as well.
There are downsides to the US model of course, and many have been highlighted in this thread. The issue is how much of a safety net can be added without sapping the vitality of the US model.
This is due to every European country having some kind of standardised and mandatory high school finals or university entrance exams; usually one type of exam serves for both. Not all have dedicated vocational education, but the academic gate keeping for four year universities is much more restrictive, whereas the financial gate keeping tends to be much less restrictive.
Imagine a diploma made up of AP tests in Language, literature, calc, a science, a social science, and a foreign language, otherwise it’s community college and vo tech training - or you’d have to get your APs at community college, but the older you get, the harder this will be.
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Such a generalization that you “gleaned” from reading an online message board," I don’t even know where to begin.
I have countless stories of kids with top 20 stats but didn’t get in because they didn’t shine in one area. How about the kid that went to Andover, came from a wealthy family, was Vice President of his class, had lights out grades, scores, and EC’s, was a DOUBLE legacy and got flat out rejected from his parent’s Ivy and just about every other one? Oh yeah, he chose between his two “safeties,” a Tier 2 LAC and Wisconsin. I personally know tens of boarding school kids with these types of stories. I also have stories of kids without T20 credentials getting in for all sorts of reasons; athletes, legacies, pointy-skilled, URM, etc.
It goes both ways. The powers that be are building classes as they see fit and extending a hand and at the same time not taking in, or in your words, discriminating against ALL subsets. Boarding school is NOT a ticket to the Ivies. You are grossly mistaken.
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Well, UIUC - which just used to go by Urbana-Champaign – has long been famous as the real thing, and that had its roots in the early tech era, DARPA times. I mean it had serious things going on before then, too, but the DARPA projects gave the affiliated public universities a certain dashing, raffish air. If you were in computer science it was very much a place to be. I believe Douglas Hofstadter was there, still might be. You got the smarts of PARC and Bell and Rand, but on a ten-speed. And then when they had to, though I don’t expect they really wanted to except to avoid dilution, they did an extraordinary job of leaping into the role of Exclusive Expensive Public. Quite a feat. I don’t know whose work that study-abroad roster is, but that’s very impressive. I wonder if there was State Dept involvement. But yeah, I’m not surprised they’re a little quiet about that. They’re already drowning in applications and it’s never going to be a good look in Springfield, spending a lot of publicly-funded loving care on study abroad. Fripperies! Furriners! I bet it’s actually a very lean operation but it wouldn’t matter in the headlines.
UMich was a really interesting story. 25 years ago it wasn’t really on the radar, but when Michigan tanked there were stories all over about the shockingly tiny proportion of the budget they were paying for. They got themselves into position and as the elite tuitions soared past the $30K mark they were in as budget excellence. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they pioneered a lot of the OOS marketing.
Nobody in academia used to be good at marketing. In the 80s the only people drowning in college brochures were guidance counselors. The schools would talk in the 90s about “selling themselves” and “working like a business” but they plainly had no idea what any of that meant. They discovered advertising around then and fumbled with it for a good ten or 15 years, and then things got real, around the same time the developers moved in and everyone had to have not only the obligatory Gehry building but many shiny new buildings. It was actually a factor in the bond ratings for the big publics, the “condition of the physical plant”. The state Us have played catch-up the whole time, in part because they just haven’t had the staff till recently, and in part because the commitment to full-on marketing wasn’t there. It’s a very difficult thing to explain at the statehouse, why you’re spending all this time recruiting kids from out of state. I mean it’s not difficult in the sense that the answer is “dude if you’re not willing to pay we have to make payroll somehow”, but politically it’s difficult. Then they had to wait for the millennials to grow up and get hired not just as designers & marketers but as directors – they did the social media, they believe in branding, they have no qualms about commodifying higher ed.
A big problem for the state Us is product differentiation. Name a private school in the northeast and anyone who went to school in that region can tell you what kind of kid goes there, what the school’s for, even if they’ve never set foot on the campus or met a kid from the place or done research. But Average State U is much the same state after state. Maybe there’s a well-regarded program in a thing, but it’s probably a graduate program. It can’t go focusing very far because it’s designed to be all things to all people. It’s supposed to provide the state with dentists and managers and insurance agents and all the normal things people need, but it also has to have scholars and scientists and probably a hospital and a journalism school and the list goes on and on. Of course it can’t be stellar at much of anything. It’s not supposed to be. In fact if someone starts building a stellar program they’re begging for heartache. It’s supposed to work like the Post Office, it doesn’t do dances for your favor, it just delivers mail to anyone who’s got an address, and it’s supposed to do it very well. But now the Post Office is supposed to dance, too, and it turns out it only gets cheers when it’s saving democracy because a union steward blows a whistle and they all get in there and muscle the job through.
Anyway – the marketing people keep struggling in the direction of differentiation and getting pushed back because they don’t really have the freedom to do that. Some colleagues and I had a big fight over the summer and fall with admin who’re all set to advertise a banner specialty here that does not currently exist, and probably won’t, because admin won’t be bothered to understand what we actually are in that general area and what it’s possible for us to become in the next decade. It also doesn’t want to spend money on people to make the new specialty go. We’re there in meetings explaining that the market will figure this out, and that it’ll backfire, do not do. Ain’t nobody listening, though.
I will say, though, I don’t think that agitation’s limited to the state Us – I see it at my alma mater, too, which recognizes the grow-or-die imperative. Only they’ve gone big. Set up a whole new college, staffed it right up, made some pretty serious mistakes in staffing that will be expensive to undo, whenever they get around to that. Success in that area was already a long shot, but the focus of the place is weird now. Administrators grabbing at things without bothering to find out what they are. But that also points to an industrywide dysfunction in administration – they go hopping from job to job like fleas, never spending long enough anywhere to learn the place where they’re working, let alone lead it well. I have guesses about why that is but am not in the game deep enough to know, in part because every time I get close I get a distinct whiff of the Federal Hill neighborhood in Providence and I decide it’d be prudent to go home.
Sure. That’s because even now, what they are is social democracies. You don’t have a fifth or a quarter of the kids growing up in and near poverty, never seeing a doctor or dentist, eating food-desert garbage, not seeing a book till they hit kindergarten. There are state creches and preschools, so little kids don’t turn into inconvenient luggage stashed here or there while the parents are trying to work; they’re in preschool. And the parents get off work in time to pick the kids up and are not expected to work 24/7. I keep wondering how a friend of mine with two boys in Britain – even Britain! – is managing while she’s working a responsible fulltime job during lockdowns and her husband’s away, and then I remember oh right, this is a country with actual mat leave and job protections, only wackadoo Americans are working like wackadoo Americans over there. She’s actually able, more or less, to both make a living and oversee her kids’ education.
I remember laughing my head off when I first saw job ads in Canada. Professional jobs, 35 hour weeks, no peekaboo game-playing about salary. I hit 35 hours some weeks by the end of Wednesday. And people go home! Why wouldn’t you have time to take your kids to the still-functioning public library with hours like that?
So yeah, you give all the kids 17 or 18 years of that across Europe, and not only are the kids better focused but they generally know how to read. You don’t get all the literacy bunched up at one end like here. Then they go to college, where they’re taught by the equivalent of our professors and not kids a few years older than they, and they find out fast whether or not they belong there. If the answer’s no, though, they’re not suddenly deep in debt from the experiment, and trying to pay it off on American min wage or close to it.
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Sure. And imagine that the AP classes had to be open to every kid. It’s amazing, in our district, how my kid’s classes got paler and paler as she went. Our district’s just about majority minority now, I think, but you’d never know it by those AP and honors classes.
It seems like the answer to that problem, then, is increased focus on k12 schooling, not resources to higher education.
By the way, I was one of the millions of American women who both made a living and oversaw her children’s education. It really can be done by those who care to do so; many do it with far fewer resources than I had. And no, I did not get paid maternity leave or the other benefits you cite. I wish I had, and I hope future generations do, but it isn’t as if this can only be accomplished in Europe or by superhuman here. I was a federal employee and made it work.
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It’s both, and then some.
Public creche-higher ed.
Much stronger labor presence and protection in legislation, preferably in a more cooperative manner than we have here.
Poking around at one part of the problem gives some relief, but doesn’t solve the problem. I recognize that a lot of people on this board have never seen the US functioning in a much more social-democratic manner, but those years are the ones that made us the superpower we are today.