Scathing Le Mond article on the history & sorry state of US higher education

Parents Forum
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<p>Crosses are not "permitted" but they are worn by many. That was true when I was in school, and it continues to be true. Sure, they are not as visible as scarves, but they are nonetheless worn--and visible to many.</p>

<p>I had that discussion with my very secular niece some time ago. She was very supportive of the ban against headscarves. I asked if any of her schoolmates wore crosses and she said yes. How did she know?</p>

<p>Am I bashing French education? Is it so excellent it can't be criticized?</p>

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<p>Two separate points should be discussed here, and IMO they concern not only France and the US, but most, if not all countries. Firstly, should there be an elite education system (HYPS, top LACs and Grandes Ecoles) in the first place? Secondly, what is the solution best suited for those who are not exceptional enough or rich enough to benefit from it? What most of us here in Frogland find difficult to accept is that for many familes, putting their children through college means debts, morgages and constant worry about financial matters. There are many positive aspects about US higher education, although I tend to think that the real plus is found in graduate studies rather than undergrad, but the stress factor, for kids and their parents (cf CC), is amazingly high. I get immense pleasure as well as much needed info from this site, but, as a teacher who spends a lot of time with parents, including those whose children are "grandes </p>

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<p>^Totally agree that there is much less angst in France 9but then, angst is to a large extent a consequence of choice. If you know you have to attend your local cc, there is nothing to worry about. </p>

<p>One of the issues that might be considered is taxation levels. It applies both to higher education and to health care. On the whole, Americans are taxed at a much lower rate than Europeans, but they have to pay more out of pocket for similar services. </p>

<p>When I was living in London, I read an article about what it cost to collect taxes. The UK had a PAYE (Pay as You Earn) system in which some government official routinely deducted taxes from your paycheck and made monthly adjustments. No two paychecks were necessarily similar as a result of these monthly adjustments. And Brits did not have to fill out headache- inducing tax returns like Americans. But there was grumbling that it took a small army of civil servants (whose salaries came out of taxpayers pockets) to deal with PAYE. Americans, the article then went on to say, in a highly simplified picture of the American tax system, filled out their own tax returns and had more control over how much they withheld from Uncle Sam (until it was time to pay); but they also employed a large army of tax accountants. The article went on to argue that the cost of tax collection proportionally, was the same in both countries.</p>

<p>It's a matter of philosophy: forced vs. voluntary savings. </p>

<p>My brother had a hard time understanding why it was so necessary for us to save so much for my kids' education. But he sent his daughter to me for one year and she was very impressed with the American system of education. She is very French and was happy to return home for her university education. Anyway, not having saved (on his quite high salary) for his children's education, my brother could not have underwritten four years of an American college for her. Moreover, she was not interested in the sciences where the difference between French and American institutions is more glaring, as Not Quite Old noted.</p>

<p>But the contrast between HYP and the Grandes Ecoles is a bit misleading. The comparison should be between what is spent on flagship institutions and the rest of the public higher education system in a state. How many students do UCLA and Cal educate out of the total university-going CA population? How much of the higher education budget do UCLA and Cal absorb? Is that the same proportion as the Grandes Ecoles vs. the rest of universities in France?</p>

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<p>Since we are into a comparative analysis of two systems of education, I would take the counterpoint to the le Monde article and argue that the French elite system of education is not really more democratic than the US system. </p>

<p>Having studied at both MIT and Ecole Polytechnique, I must say that there was far more diversity at MIT, a private university where annual cost of attendance approaches $50,000 than at Polytechnique, where there is no tuition and students are paid a salary as officers. At MIT over two thirds of students are on financial aid, while at Polytechnique, virtually all students are solidly upper middle class. The smattering of minorities are essentially the sons of the elites from the former French colonies. </p>

<p>The real challenge for the French educational system is how to increase socio-economic diversity of its elite institutions. Currently, over 60% of students at the CPGE level (prep schools for the Grandes Ecoles) level come from the upper quintile in income and less than 18% receive financial aid (boursiers). The new President has made it an official objective to nearly double the students on financial aid that can attend the CPGE from the current level to over a third. On the other hand, he remains firmly opposed to any form of affirmative action, which is called in France "discrimination positive". These two statements cannot be reconciled. </p>

<p>Over 80% of students entering the CPGE were already in the top quartile in academic achievement at the end of elementary school. The problem of increased access can therefore only be solved through a complete restructuring of the secondary education system, which generally fails the less privileged. To get another 1,000 students from lower income families qualified to attend the CPGE you need to essentially pull 100,000 students from their current environment and put them into State subsidized boarding schools through middle and high school. This is not going to happen. With a totally numbers driven system for admission, the Grandes Ecoles will continue to recruit the students who have the family support and resources for intensive training for 14 to 15 years for adequate preparation. In one sense that may please some, the French elite system of education is a true meritocracy in that gender, ethnic or socio-economic background is irrelevant for admission. In another sense, it is highly hypocritical or at least unenlightened, in that it fails to recognize that those who can succeed well in that type of system are de-facto part of a privileged class. </p>

<p>I personally believe the admission system practiced by elite institutions in the US is inherently more fair, in that it recognizes the relative achievement of students in the context of what was available to them as opposed to just some absolute measure of achievement, highly correlated with income and parental education. The French still cling to Aristotle's view of democracy where things unequal should not be tried to be made equal. If you are born in one of the urban ghettos or "cites" surrounding the major French cities, why should you get a "tip" in admission to Sciences Po? How is that more "fair" when the admissions system at Sciencs Po is heavily weighted by your knowledge of foreign languages, highly correlated with disposable income? When does that urban kid have the opportunity to vacation in Spain or England to perfect his language skills? </p>

<p>A catastrophic side effect of this type of narrow minded policy has been the virtual eradication of women from the upper levels of academia in the natural sciences. The closure of the female versions of the Ecoles Normales Superieures in the 80s in a spirit of "equality" has led to near complete disappearance of women from mathematics or physics teaching in french universities. Should admission to an institution chartered to train teachers exclusively rely on a math olympiad type of examination? To me this is more another example of means obscuring the ends. </p>

<p>In my view, the Le Monde article is therefore not only misguided, but also misinformed, something you would not expect from such a publication. </p>

<p>.</p>

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<p>Cellardweller, your facts are right, and your arguments are solid. Mine are necessarily shaky, otherwise why would D2 be going to college in the States? The only point I feel is worth repeating, is that I still feel that middle-class families whose progeny is neither Einstein nor Carl Lewis should be allowed to educate their family without borderline bankruptcy.</p>

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<p>Marite</p>

<p>Where did I say or even hint that you are trashing Tsinghua or Peking University? Actually our disagreement is the opposite. You think there is a huge insurmountable gap between the big 2 and the rest, while I think that while the big 2 are clearly better, but you can still get a good education from one of lower 48. This is analogous to difference in opinion in cc. Some thinks that they have to go to HYPMS, while others think that the state flagship may not be as good as HYPMS, but one can still get a good education there.</p>

<p>Earlier I read a book on the Microsoft research lab in China. Yes, they located it in Beijing and close to Tsinghua, but they recruit all over China. It would be stupid for Microsoft to ignore the talent in the state universities, and this is despite the fact it require a lot of work to move them to Beijing. The research lab had posted a list of research paper the lab contributed to SIGIR, and looking at the author's universities, among those from China, about half are from Tsinghua and Peking, the state universities combined takes up the other half. I also see similar trend when I do a search on the people pages of Beijing Microsoft research lab.</p>

<p>So clearly the big 2 is better, but we cannot dismiss the contribution of the other 48.</p>

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<p>Lost in translat, I agree that some middle class families in the US may be squeezed out of private universities strictly on economic grounds. But I am not sure their fallback options are any worse than in France.</p>

<p>I believe that we would both agree than any student in the US who would be "Grande Ecoles material" in France, would generally qualify for substantial merit aid from many top US universities. Clearly HYPSM and some top LACs do not offer merit aid, but many others do. Some smaller colleges even offer merit aid to B/B+ students who would not be admitted to the most selective colleges. </p>

<p>Many states also have excellent in state public schools, where tuition is not out of line with that of some of the Grandes Ecoles. In some parts of the country, particularly the midwest, it is often the destination of choice. I live for instance in CT, and the State has invested over $2 billion to make its flagship university among the very best public schools in the Northeast. Tuition is a relative bargain and additional scholarships are available based on need and merit. For our kids, the instate public was a solid backup and while the infrastructrure lags behind that of top private schools in the US, it certainly shines in comparison to most universities outside of the US, Oxbridge included. I don't feel they would have been deprived of a solid education had we not been able to finance their education at a private university. In many cases, they would be able to enroll at top private colleges as a graduate student. </p>

<p>Had we lived in France and had my kids not been admitted into the CPGE (or decided not to choose that route), I believe their options would have been vastly more limited. While recently made available to university students, the ability to integrate the GE from non-traditional routes is still extremely limited.</p>

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<p>I don't know anything about the french university system, but I know two professors who attended Ecoles Normales Superieures and polytechnique. They are absolutely brilliant, but one of them is a not a good teacher. He taught at polytechnique for some time before coming here, and he is always complaining about American students. He is a very good adviser though.</p>

<p>I think there are more Field medalist associated with Ecoles Normales Superieures than any university (students who attended). There is so much screening that the professors do not have to spend any time on teaching.</p>

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<p>bomgeedad:</p>

<p>Your mileage may vary, as they say. I do not claim that no school other than Tsinghua or Beida can or do make contributions. So does Podunk U in the US. But Podunk U is not HYPSM. And I do believe that the gap between the top universities in China and the lower tiers is larger than in the US. As well, even if you have 50 excellent universities each educating hmmmm 50,000 students, that is a total of 2500000 students for a population of 1.3 billions. THAT is the problem, not the fact that there are SOME excellent universities. And that was my point. Gone are the days when admission was based on loyalty to Maoism, having parents who were in the CCP, and so on; that is huge progress. But in terms of addressing the needs of the 1.3 billion Chinese, the educational system is still lacking.</p>

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<p>Tega:</p>

<p>I don't think the problem of ENS graduates is their lack of interest in teaching. After all, that is why they went to ENS (for the most part). Having studied under both systems, I think the problem is more cultural than anything else. French university teaching (as in most countries outside of the US) is still fundamentally based around formal lectures with little or no interaction with students. Even at the ENS, which is more like a small LAC, a student would never dream of interrupting the professor to ask a question, for fear of looking stupid. I could not believe, when to I went to MIT for grad school, that students would dare stop a lecture to ask sometimes trivial questions. In France, you would be shot on the spot or undressed publicly for your audacity. As top ENS graduates are leaving France for greener pastures in the US, they quickly start realizing that teaching involves two way communication. My D's multivariable calculus teacher is a young ENS graduate and Polytechnique PhD (at age 22). His accent is sometimes on the heavy side, but the students love him. They are thrilled by his brilliance and his enthusiasm for the field is contagious. He encourages questions and knows his chances of tenure will also in part depend on his teaching ability.</p>

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<p>cellardweller:
You speak as though students who do not attend a grande Ecole are consigned to oblivion. As stated previously, the Grandes Ecoles are a key to success in some fields, including politics, but Law school, medical school and others are taught in universities exclusively. Although material conditions are not as favourable as in the States, a serious student can get a good degree and a good job without having attended a Grande Ecole and with no debt.
Tega: one of the unfortunate differences between the US and France when it comes to university teaching is that the French still practice "le cours magistral": One teacher talking and a hundred students taking notes. There is no tutorial system and many professors are unused to interactive classes. All professors have tenure, so many feel that they don't have to make any effort, especially when they have the reputation of being brilliant!</p>

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<p>^Yes. I remember when French profs tried to be more student-friendly and interactive. It was reported that their efforts consisted of standing in front of instead of behind their desk, but that they kept on lecturing as they always have! </p>

<p>I also agree that you can get a good education and be successful, whatever the conditions in which learning and teaching are taking place. My brother who graduated from Nanterre had a very successful career--as did the one who attended Polytechnique and Sup'A</p>

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<p>Lost in trans: I agree that law and medicine are two exceptions to the more general rule. I have mostly referred to education in the fields of science, business and technology, where the GEs have been considered the "Voie Royale". Most civil servants and captains of industry are graduates of these schools, which wield much greater control in France than the top 100 universities in the US. Still, even in law or medicine, there are very few options remaining for those who fail the brutal examinations after the first year of university studies. You can always succeed with enough determination, but I believe that in France the barriers to a decent paying job for university graduates are higher than in the US, largely because of the cartelization of opportunities within government and industry by GEs.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
The Grandes Ecoles account for 4% of the total population and 30% of the budget. While the very top US colleges also account for a small percentage of the total student population, they do not account for that much of a percentage in expenditures.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>When taking endowments into account the picture looks more French. However, the point of my question was:</p>

<p>If in France the bottom X percent get an education that is shoddy and shabby, and in the US a similar (if possibly lower) percentage get an education that is shoddy and expensive, that simply means Americans spend more money on academically irrelevant comforts such as housing their children far from home or keeping them out of the work force. It is not a commendation of the US undergraduate system. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Further the quality of education and accommodations at second and even third tier universities are not so very inferior, whereas the difference between a Grande Ecole and other institutions of higher learning is extremely pronounced.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>That is partly due to the high level of the GEs, and not only the depletion of the funding for the other schools. The curriculum runs well into the US graduate level, in part because remediation of high school material (by European standards) is not included in the process. In the US with its broken secondary schools, doing high school in college is a basic feature of the business.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
That is partly due to the high level of the GEs, and not only the depletion of the funding for the other schools. The curriculum runs well into the US graduate level, in part because remediation of high school material (by European standards) is not included in the process. In the US with its broken secondary schools, doing high school in college is a basic feature of the business.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I am not so sure. It is true that the k-12 curriculum in the US is not as complete or challenging as what is available to French or German or British students. Hence the 4-year instead of 3-year college program in the US, with a core curriculum designed to provide the knowledge that European (and other) students receive in k-12. But I do not think that there is much of a difference after the first degree in levels of preparation.</p>

<p>If we accept that the GEs have some equivalents in the US, such as Caltech or MIT or HYPSM, then I would still maintain the gap between the latter and even a system perennially underfunded such as UMASS-Amherst is less than the gap between a GE and some provincial university in France. The Grandes Ecoles and a few others absorb so much of the resources and the best students that the other parts of the system suffer as a whole.</p>

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<p>Well, I am late to this conversation (back from vacation) and much less well informed than most of the participants. But that rarely stops me, and I have a couple of things to add:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Re the original article: The thesis is way overstated, and comes across like special pleading by the UC faculty union, but the central point is almost unarguable: The ratio of social funding to private funding of higher education has shifted considerably in the past 15-20 years, and the trend seems to be continuing. Enormous prosperity, and the slow pace of the change, have masked the effect of this. Also, there has been a contrary trend (I believe) of significant quality improvement at the middle levels of American higher education, so that, as some have pointed out, more people are getting better education for the higher costs they are paying. But, still, it is worth thinking about this, as many of us do.</p></li>
<li><p>My evidence consists entirely of reading the recent French best-seller Kiffe kiffe demain, but if the experiences reported in that book are in the ballpark of reality, the French secondary education system is not doing a significantly better job for poor students from non-mainstream cultures than the U.S. system does for the equivalent students here. (Actually, the evidence of the book is also that the French system did fine by the author, one way or another, even if it tried to turn her into a hairdresser.) As Americans, we have taken the ideal of universal education for a very diverse population very seriously for the past 50 years at least, maybe more. Most European systems are now facing some of the same challenges faced here, but they are at a completely different point on the learning and political curves.</p></li>
<li><p>My family and I spend a lovely, long evening in Barcelona with a friend I hadn't seen in decades. The friend and his wife are both successful research-oriented MDs; their daughter is a third-year university student (like mine)studying medicine (unlike mine). After a short discussion about Jane Austen in which both my children participated (disagreeing between them), my friend and his wife both said that they thought the Spanish education system, while successful in many respects, had completely abandoned the humanities. Their daughter and the older students they work with are almost completely ignorant about literature, etc., something that saddens them a lot. (My friend's secondary education was in the Lycee Francaise in Barcelona.)</p></li>
</ol>

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<p>Quote:"I am not so sure. It is true that the k-12 curriculum in the US is not as complete or challenging as what is available to French or German or British students. Hence the 4-year instead of 3-year college program in the US, with a core curriculum designed to provide the knowledge that European (and other) students receive in k-12. But I do not think that there is much of a difference after the first degree in levels of preparation"</p>

<p>D1 is a product of CPGE ( 2 years of pre-GE training). D2 has just started as a frosh at a good LAC. In a year, I will be able to report on how she compares to her American peers after highschooling in a mediocre lyc</p>

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<p>"... it will give me a basis of comparison" but it shouldn't. Even though we all do it, we should not form generalizations based on anecdotal experiences, especially comparing siblings' individual experiences. What we do best here is make each other aware of available information, research, policy, etc., though collective opinions might help when there is a dearth of objective information.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
As Americans, we have taken the ideal of universal education for a very diverse population very seriously for the past 50 years at least, maybe more. Most European systems are now facing some of the same challenges faced here, but they are at a completely different point on the learning and political curves.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>JHS, I am a bit perplexed by the comment, and could I ask to help me understand it? </p>

<p>Are you saying that the United States' education system had to deal with a more diverse population than their European counterparts? Are you making a reference to the forced integration of the black population, and a later stage of the immigrant waves from Mexico and the South or from Asia? </p>

<p>If that is the case, I believe that patterns of immigration have not left Western European countries immune to the need to avoid segregation in their schools. And, for what it is worth, the way one country faces such issue might depend heavily on the political structure of the education system. Contrary to the United States that seems to believe that school choice should exist only for the rich and socially mobile, a country such as Belgium (among others) have the concept of school choice and school freedom protected by their ... Constitution. </p>

<p>Based on our success with "universal" education, I do not think that the United States is ahead of many countries and that its "learning curve" is hardly pointing upwards.</p>

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<p>In the US (in my view), we have gone through a lot of cycles of concern over the various issues raised by universal education for a culturally and economically heterogeneous population: equal funding, integration vs. neighborhood schooling, second-languages, religion vs. secularism, centralism vs. local control, dominant culture vs. diversity, and radical differences between tax/voting bases and the children being educated. When I said "learning curve", I didn't mean to imply that we were further along towards getting everything right. What I meant was that we had more experience with the various ways of getting it wrong, something I think the European countries are just beginning to deal with.</p>

<p>Everything is easier when you have a homogeneous population, or nearly so. When I was a child, the French prided themselves (with a great deal of justification) on how color-blind French society was, but it turned out that it was somewhat easier to be color blind when most of the people of color you met were people like James Baldwin, Chou En-lai, or Franz Fanon, there weren't very many of them, and they were there because they liked mainstream French values by and large (and, yes, that includes Chou and Fanon). It's a different political proposition altogether when, say, rural, conservative, Catholic voters with a low birth rate realize that they are being asked to pay a lot of money to educate semi-urban Muslim kids who may be wearing veils and who may not like Camembert very much, and who don't all want to be French. Everything is complicated, there are 15 sides to every issue, and it is depressingly easy to do a bad job of everything.</p>