What about people who are in the group of being athletic? Most are not. Or highly intelligent? Most are not.
You have said you learned the rules/game of admissions and as a result helped your kids get into elite schools. How about kids who don’t have those parents? Are they in a different group too?
Admissions was awful and as much as my kiddo hated it, I see her ramping up again in regards to grad school - and it’s 2 years away. We talk a lot about how it’s fine to plan ahead but she regretted making high school all about college so she should be careful not to make that same mistake again. She chose her current school partially based on the fit for her personality - socially as well as academically. We don’t want her to not take advantage of the social opportunities because she’s worried about grad school for 4 years.
Gaaah I was worried about this one, too. Fortunately, the state-U result means that the jump to a pipeline grad school’s nearly impossible, I don’t have $150K to give her for a master’s degree, and she’s too sensible to get talked into taking out massive loans for one. So unless she undergoes a conversion, decides she wants to be a professor, and makes her way into a PhD program, there’s little point in worrying about grad school, and no reason to spend four years amping up for the application and polishing/burnishing the resume. So there we go, 20th-c college experience coming right up, if threadbare and full of extremely anxious people all around.
For real, just come from a family that isn’t school-sports-obsessed and/or hasn’t had the money to push a kid through K-12 sportsmania. Their focus will be entirely on the academic/social side, and they won’t know that many of the kids at the SLACs are athletes. They also won’t respond to the advertising about sports, shrugging and figuring it’s meant to appeal to someone who likes that stuff and maybe is trying to get a scholarship. That whole part of college will be invisible to them.
Keep in mind that suburban and rural kids still live in a much more school-sports-obsessed world than city kids do. Partly because there’s just a lot more to do in cities, but for all the other usual reasons, too. Our high school has a shocking amount of real estate and infrastructure devoted to sports, but this is absolutely not normal in densely-populated areas.
What people are not considering, when comparing the USA to other countries, is the sheer number of colleges and universities that are available. A graduating high school student in, say, France, will likely look at a subset of the 80 or so French universities, and maybe a handful of world famous universities in the rest of the world.
A graduating high school student in the USA is not only looking at their few dozen state colleges and universities and the private colleges in the state, but is also generally considering colleges and universities in the states which are adjacent to their home state, and other across much of the USA. They are not generally looking through all 2,000 or so 4 year non-profit universities, but, for most university-bound American students, there are a few hundred colleges worth considering. The USA also has some dozens of community colleges open to any particular student.
So Israel has the population of New Jersey, and and New Jersey has about the same number of non-profit colleges and universities (around 55), but a student in New Jersey also has over 300 choices next door in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Then there are another few hundred within easy driving or train trip distance in New England and Virginia. So while an Israeli prospective students who wants to attend a university has a realistic list of a couple dozen appropriate colleges and universities (and only 8 “world-ranked” universities), a New Jersey kid has about 10X as many colleges and universities (or more) for any given category.
Even without prestige games, nowadays, for a graduating high school student in the USA, finding the “right” college is difficult.
It’s not because of any “plan” on part of the colleges, but simply the result of the history of the growth of higher education and technology.
The public (and private) university system of the USA was established under the assumption that most college-bound students would attend a college which was relatively close to them. This was no different than the systems in most of the rest of the world. However, as transportation improved, it didn’t really affect European college-bound students, since they would still almost all attending the universities of their own country.
On the other hand, in the USA, improved transportation opened colleges and universities in adjacent or not-so-adjacent states. So an average American college-bound student can choose from the colleges of the equivalent of 48 European countries, or 50, if they don’t mind really long-distance travel.
However, aren’t the US students much more constrained in university choice by costs and parental money than students in many other countries?
I.e. for most US students, the apparent plethora of choices becomes much smaller when cost limitations are considered. In some states, even the in state public universities are difficult to afford by many state resident students.
Well…I mean we’ve had roads and things for a long time, but it wasn’t all that usual to go far from home for college till the late 90s or so.
A few things contributed to that. One, state universities started getting expensive enough, in the wake of declining legislative support, that in combination with lavish private-school fin aid it was worth looking around for moderate-income families. The same declining support pushed public universities to develop tiered tuition structures, chase OOS and international students, and position as public Ivies. Two, the student market got much bigger: widening inequality, deindustrialization, and growing complexity made college, and college prestige, suddenly much more necessary than it had been just as a new giant generation was coming of age. Three, as a debt/developer-driven building boom started at universities, there was a gold rush for students and the emergence of national advertising for what had been very much regional or state schools.
So, you know. You can see it as yet another consequence of Reaganism amped up by Newt & Co., then really taken for a ride by the financial people starting around 2000 or so. It’s why “choose from all over the country” is accompanied by massive student debt.
(Keep in mind, too, that the EU’s allowed an explosion of out-of-home-country study over the last 25 years. They’ve got a lot of choice there. And not so much debt or admissions berserkery.)
Absolutely, at least in a large number of European countries. If you are French, public universities cost a pittance, and even private universities are ridiculously cheap. In Norway, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Greece and a couple others, citizens also do not pay tuition. They also have socialized medicine, so students don’t have to worry about healthcare costs. So the major costs are living expenses, which can be pretty high, bit still remain low, compared to college costs in the USA.
Of course, European colleges are very different places - they are generally in cities, and provide little else but classes (the UK is a different story, though), and students need to find their own accommodations. Faculty are not available outside office hours and class, and are not really involved. After all, students are not paying tuition, so faculty don’t really have that much incentive to keep them happy. Other services are also nonexistent.
So it’s good and bad. Good because it’s cheap or free, but bad, since it’s swim or sink, which is not always a good idea for an 18 year old. There is no academic support, no support if there is conflict with a professors or another student, and no support if anything else goes wrong with life, including the studies.
Another reason for the lower price is that access to colleges is limited by tracking, which keeps the number of students who are college-bound relatively low. Again, it’s good and it’s bad. It’s good because you don’t have kids for whom colleges is not the best option wasting their time and money. It’s bad, because the reasons that a kid may not perform in school may not be related to academic talent but to issues like income, learning disabilities, and lack of fit between a kid and the school to which they are assigned. One bad teacher who takes a dislike to a student in third grade can end up keeping that student on the non-university track for the rest of their schooling.
BTW, French students are not that happy with their universities - they have staged a number of protests about their situation. Of course, protests are a common French pastime…
On the other hand, no matter how unhappy the French happen to be during university, admissions likely is a lot less stressful.
The UK is different, among other things because of cost, including for UK citizens.
Massively outdated misconception.
First time tertiary entry rate for the cohort under 25 in 2018:
OECD average 54%.
EU23 average: 53%
USA: 46%
UK: 63%
Germany: 52%
Italy: 48%
Netherlands 62%.
And so on. You don’t have to take my word for it. Table B4.1
European universities are cheap because they are cheap - see the rest of your description, which is spot on. Not because they keep demand artificially low.
But note that these rates include “short cycle” tertiary education (which appears to describe programs that do not lead to a bachelor’s degree, such as associates degree programs, trade certifications, etc.). It does look like the US has a relatively high percentage of tertiary education entrants going into “short cycle” programs (47%, versus 17% for OECD and 13% for EU23).
Of course, what students actually complete may be a different story.
But that just means that half of all students in the US who enter tertiary education start at community colleges, and that sounds about right.
It also means that the rate of students entering four year colleges is even lower than in most OECD countries, where students who gain vocational qualifications tend to gain them at the upper secondary level.
However, the rate of students completing bachelor level may be higher than the rate of students entering, when factoring in students who transfer to a four year college after community college.
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with my point that the rates of students who gain university entrance qualifications and enter tertiary education has completely caught up to US rates (and sometimes surpassed them) all over the world and and people who are trying to tell you that higher education in the rest of the world is cheaper because tracking is artificially keeping student numbers low are feeding you a lie.
Note I am not saying anything about the quality of those various education systems. Just that there is no relation between tracking in secondary education, and cost of tertiary education. None.
My point was not that they were keeping demand artificially low to keep prices down. My point was that they limited access to the universities for other reasons, and, as a result, they could afford to keep prices lower.
Germany still has tracking, and the three-tier highschool system, in which Gymnasium students are automatically tracked to University, Realschule and Hauptschule kids are tracked to different level of trade and technical training. However, there are now mixed program schools, and there are routes to university for students from all high schools.
But bottom line, you’re correct that the percentage of German highschool students who attend a university has increased substantially in the past two decades, and while tracking is an issue, it is not keeping university attendance all that much lower that it would be without tracking.
I guess that I dislike tracking even more than I did before…
But the numbers entering four year institutions aren’t lower, as a share of the under 25 population they are in fact higher, and you still haven’t explained where you are getting your causal relationship from.
One result of moving control of university access to the secondary level is that there is much more predictability and transparency in the system, and as a result, universities, even those who rank very high internationally, can afford to keep many arts and sciences open enrolment, reserving access control at the admissions level to the popular preprofessional subjects such as law, medicine, psychology etc. Not sure how open enrolment is supposed to keep down cost.
And now, please, name a reputable four year institution in the US with open enrolment. I’m waiting,
The levels, and the institutional actors, vary. But access is controlled everywhere. Tracking, secondary school finals, university entrance exams, competitive admissions, interviews, weed out. Personally, I’d say the weed out system in open enrolment institutions is the most inefficient and costly of all.
This is not a defense of tracking. Feel free to hate it. Personally, I prefer it to residential segregation, because at least it happens after the child has started school, as opposed to before the child is born. I haven’t yet seen the perfect system to determine academic readiness at any level.
Do those other countries not have residential segregation by SES or race/ethnicity/religion? Have they managed to prevent SES or race/ethnicity/religion from influencing tracking decisions?
Some more, some less, none to the degree the US has, and as usual with indices of inequality, with Northern Europe at the bottom and the UK at the top of the scale. And school funding by property tax as opposed to regional or national level is virtually unknown outside the US.
SES influences everything. Everywhere. However, in countries with lower inequality indices, the differences in SES by aren’t as stark, so they do not influence residential areas, and consequently schooling, as much.
Until tracking, which segregates neatly by SES. At a later age.
My point is precisely that these segregations happen, and at the end of the line, tertiary level at the latest, reflect a country’s social equality or, respectively, social stratification. Segregation by income at the college level in the US is brutal. Others may find segregation by ability at the transition to secondary school brutal. SES is working in the background, insidiously, all the time.
But exploding college costs in the US? Look elsewhere.
Sorry @ucbalumnus, needed a good nights sleep and realised I hadn’t really answered your question.
The OECD has data on all this, too, and there are countries in which educational attainment very closely correlates with parental SES and countries where it doesn’t as much, and whether those countries track or not is all over the map (and various regions within countries can differ, too, because there are many countries in which education isn’t centralised). It’s all in how you do it. IIRC the US is somewhere in the middle, not great, not bad, the worst tend to be emerging economies with high inequality coefficient. I’ll look it up and come back.
I personally have experience with tracking by GPA coupled with weed out, which can actually hurt kids in high SES elementary schools, because it is harder to achieve the required grades against the competition. Children from low SES schools may have an easier time to achieve the required GPA, but may fail out quickly.
There is also data that SES has the highest effect when parental choice comes in - for kids on the bubble, where high SES parents will always go for the more prestigious track, whereas low SES parents tend to opt for the lower risk option.
As a high schooler, I was once part of the army of tutors trying to keep a high SES kid in the prestigious track. They usually fail out eventually, their self esteem is shot and their options have narrowed.
The numbers were lower for years until they started making it easier (or even possible) for students in schools other than the Gymnasiums to take the Abitur. The percent of graduating high school students who went on to attend university in Germany in 2000 was 33%, and it was even lower earlier.
Even now, in the USA, 44% of the graduating students attend 4 year schools, and around 22% attend 2 year schools, and they pay tuition. A LOT of tuition. University enrollment for German students is 45% (the rest are international students).
So yes, tracking on its own keeps admissions to universities in Germany lower than it would be otherwise, and when tracking also included tracking to abitur exams it limited access even more.
The connection between lower enrollment and the ability to provide free university is conjecture, but I do not think that it is farfetched to assume that free or very low tuition is much more likely in a society which looks at university attendance as only one of number of high school outcomes which are offered, and one which is considered appropriate for only a small percent of high school graduates.
The fact that a much higher percent of German high school students now attend university should not obscure the fact that social conditions were very different when the governments of Germany decided that free tuition for university is a good idea.
Are more kids in college necessarily better? If more of them went to trade schools instead, would employers necessarily still demand college degrees? A college degree doesn’t necessarily prepare students better for some, perhaps many, lines of work. It also isn’t necessarily more equitable if the same kids still end up in the same types of work with their college degrees, especially if they graduate with debt.
Probably not. We just need a better way to figure out who would do best in any of a number of post-high school career tracks. As it is, family wealth and connections and untrained teacher opinion seem to be way too central in making that determination.
I don’t have first-hand experience with the German system but in Europe it is considered a great success and is emulated by other nations. I would not say that the teachers are “untrained” - because of this system everybody in Germany is very well trained in what they do, from bakers to electrician to teachers.
Also, the remunerations between professions is much more equitable with a doctor’s salary for instance not much higher than a trade profession. We have German doctors in our company that work as Product managers in the US as the pay is higher. All in all, a much more balanced society.
I believe, there is more than one checkpoints to enter the University stream.