6 ms·

The entire US university system is a joke. $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. Hundreds of universities who rely on foreigners wh

The entire US university system is a joke. $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. Hundreds of universities who rely on foreigners who come to the US for studies for their survival. And most of these foreigners are only coming because they want to immigrate and student visa is an easy entry ticket.

conception 6y ago
40k/yr is above the average for private universities in the US. The average public is ~10k/yr. Community college 3-4K.
- baoha 6y ago
  Welcome to California!
- desert_boi 6y ago
  If you go to public school in the American West, it can be even cheaper. Boise State was $6K a year without room and board. It is a football team with a school attached though.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Not just the west, plenty of states in the country have excellent public universities that are extremely affordable, and even more so when you go to community college for the first two years. I graduated with a degree in computer science from a pretty good state school a for around 14 grand in debt. My wife has 3 degrees and has no debt now. My student loan payments were 200 dollars a month, pretty affordable.
  - adventured 6y ago
    As another prominent example, Florida State is a top 20-30 public school, and is ~$5,600 in-state.
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  UC is probably double that easily by now and all of them are that cheap for in-state only. Out of state is like 20-30k
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    UC Berkeley: $14,254
    - dilyevsky 6y ago
      Wow it stayed the same in nearly 10 years since i last looked at it. Probably only thing I’m aware of that did in CA
- vecinu 6y ago
  My buddy is paying for his wife's degree in Fashion studies @ $30k/year in San Francisco. As an international student. This is a degree that most likely has minimum wage earning potential.
arkis22 6y ago
in other words... Since we've given out federal education loans, educational outcomes have been drastically less effective
- kingaillas 6y ago
  And here I thought the mantra on this site was "correlation is not causation."
  - arkis22 6y ago
    it is. define the correlation
question000 6y ago
Without the university system we'd just be Saudi Arabia though. It's just a matter of time until we nationalize everything and finally get a modern system. It's inevitable, the US university system just isn't competitive anymore for actual US citizens.
- niij 6y ago
  State schools provide adequate education and are affordable. I hope the same people who introduced federal student loans don't decide to nationalize the education system because the former was an absolute disaster.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ineedasername 6y ago
Keep in mind that in many European countries, even if college is free, not everyone gets to go to it. In Germany, students are heavily segmented into tracks from an early point in their academic career, and if you're not in the traditional "college" track, tough luck: it's very difficult to get moved. Honestly I don't know whether or not that's a better system. Whether students come out with a degree or a trade, they don't come out with debt. It's trading a degree of social mobility for economic gains, but in the US you can find yourself left out of either choice. As for cost, $40,000 is the typical private school. Absent the top tiers, there's no reason to pay that price over a public University, where tuition in most states hovers around $10k per year. And if you do 2 years of community college first and finish up at a 4 year school, you can cut the average cost per year down to something like $7k. Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices. Choosing the massive debt of a private school, or paying and extra $12k per year to live in a dorm "for the experience". That's how you run up $100,000 in debt before you even get a job. Don't have the money without taking out loans? Stay local, commute, find friends that live on campus and crash at their rooms every once in a while. College is expensive partly because our society treats it as a right of passage rather than an educational experience.
- jknz 6y ago
  > Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices. I am not sure families are the ones to blame here. Astronomical tuition and loan interests that cannot be forgotten in bankruptcy is a predatory combo. In the European countries you mention no student start their professional like with $50k-100k in unforgivable debt.
  - donedealomg 6y ago
    Yeah sorry that in Europe people go to local univerities, live at home, take the bus to school and don't travel the world and buy useless things on a student loan. In my opinion, Americans could do exactly the same to a local community college and have basically no debt.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
jldugger 6y ago
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. It helps to recall that taxes pay for this 'free' service. American tuition has risen pretty much in lock step with state funding cuts, which itself is often motivated by a combination of partisan politics, constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, federally prohibited bankruptcies, and negative economic shocks.
echelon 6y ago
$40k/yr pays for the name of the school. You can go to a great in-state public university for $6/yr or less. Pedigrees are dumb. Humanities degrees for more than $6k/yr are absurd. Georgia Tech offers a fully accredited online masters CS program for $6k as the total program cost, and their teaching is world-class.
- formercoder 6y ago
  Pedigree is one word, network is another.
- barumi 6y ago
  > Pedigrees are dumb. "Pedigree", and other terms used to refer to the same concept, are nothing more than the reflection of the track record of an institution regarding scientific quality and training. "Pedigree" also reflects a pre-screening of candidates with regards to academic and technical potential. It might be true that I won't become the next Niels Bohr if I attend the same universities he attended or lectured in, but let's not fool ourselves into assuming that you'll learn the same from a course taught by amateur underperforming lecturers than what you would from a course taught by nobel laureates to a room of top-performers.
  - Leherenn 6y ago
    I don't think the quality of the lecturers matters that much. It's all about the students for me: good students create an environment and expectations that drive the whole thing. An excellent teacher isn't going to drag average students to amazing, but conversely a decidedly average teacher will not make amazing students average. Also, I am not convinced your average Nobel laureates is a particularly good teacher. If anything, from experience, research focused professors often see teaching as a chore and it has a clear impact on the quality of their teaching. If we're talking about teaching calculus 101, I'd much rather have a no-name professor who is a good pedagogue and loves teaching than a Fields medal winner. Of course, in reality, the fact you were taught by $famous professor is probably more valuable than what you actually learned in the class.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
adventured 6y ago
If the European university systems are so great, why are their results so horrible? Where's the great wealth, economic growth, high productivity, and high incomes? The majority of Europe is languishing very badly and it's getting worse by the year. > $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. It's not free at all, and everyone knows it's not free. Let's see you do the final tally, which includes income across a lifetime vs tax rates. Europeans pay epic taxes in part for that 'free' college. The US middle class pays very low taxes by comparison. That has to be factored into the equation. The US middle class is richer than the middle class in: Sweden, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Greece, Poland and Czechia among numerous others. The US median wealth figure is comparable to Norway. I think it's important to restate that: the US middle class is richer than the middle class in Sweden, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark - you know, just four of the supposedly best off nations in world history. So where are the great results for that non-free education?
- ojbyrne 6y ago
  Important to realize that that lifetime income is spread over a shorter lifetime: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex... Also citations?
- adamnemecek 6y ago
  I legit font get where most of the purported US wealth is concentrated, most US cities are dilapidated. By how much do you think are European taxes higher than US taxes?
  - cyberdrunk 6y ago
    > I legit font get where most of the purported US wealth is concentrated, most US cities are dilapidated Isn't this because US cities (esp. the dilapidated ones) are in big part storage for the poor, and the middle class lives in suburbs?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
csa 6y ago
> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. If you pay $40k a year in the US and think that you are paying for an education, then, yes, you will be disappointed. For schools at that price point, you are paying for the network. Whether the network delivers or not is a different issue — sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very context-specific.

conception 6y ago

40k/yr is above the average for private universities in the US. The average public is ~10k/yr. Community college 3-4K.

baoha 6y ago
Welcome to California!
desert_boi 6y ago
If you go to public school in the American West, it can be even cheaper. Boise State was $6K a year without room and board. It is a football team with a school attached though.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Not just the west, plenty of states in the country have excellent public universities that are extremely affordable, and even more so when you go to community college for the first two years. I graduated with a degree in computer science from a pretty good state school a for around 14 grand in debt. My wife has 3 degrees and has no debt now. My student loan payments were 200 dollars a month, pretty affordable.
- adventured 6y ago
  As another prominent example, Florida State is a top 20-30 public school, and is ~$5,600 in-state.
dilyevsky 6y ago
UC is probably double that easily by now and all of them are that cheap for in-state only. Out of state is like 20-30k
- BeetleB 6y ago
  UC Berkeley: $14,254
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    Wow it stayed the same in nearly 10 years since i last looked at it. Probably only thing I’m aware of that did in CA
vecinu 6y ago
My buddy is paying for his wife's degree in Fashion studies @ $30k/year in San Francisco. As an international student. This is a degree that most likely has minimum wage earning potential.

arkis22 6y ago

in other words... Since we've given out federal education loans, educational outcomes have been drastically less effective

kingaillas 6y ago
And here I thought the mantra on this site was "correlation is not causation."
- arkis22 6y ago
  it is. define the correlation

question000 6y ago

Without the university system we'd just be Saudi Arabia though. It's just a matter of time until we nationalize everything and finally get a modern system. It's inevitable, the US university system just isn't competitive anymore for actual US citizens.

niij 6y ago
State schools provide adequate education and are affordable. I hope the same people who introduced federal student loans don't decide to nationalize the education system because the former was an absolute disaster.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ineedasername 6y ago

Keep in mind that in many European countries, even if college is free, not everyone gets to go to it. In Germany, students are heavily segmented into tracks from an early point in their academic career, and if you're not in the traditional "college" track, tough luck: it's very difficult to get moved. Honestly I don't know whether or not that's a better system. Whether students come out with a degree or a trade, they don't come out with debt. It's trading a degree of social mobility for economic gains, but in the US you can find yourself left out of either choice. As for cost, $40,000 is the typical private school. Absent the top tiers, there's no reason to pay that price over a public University, where tuition in most states hovers around $10k per year. And if you do 2 years of community college first and finish up at a 4 year school, you can cut the average cost per year down to something like $7k. Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices. Choosing the massive debt of a private school, or paying and extra $12k per year to live in a dorm "for the experience". That's how you run up $100,000 in debt before you even get a job. Don't have the money without taking out loans? Stay local, commute, find friends that live on campus and crash at their rooms every once in a while. College is expensive partly because our society treats it as a right of passage rather than an educational experience.

jknz 6y ago
> Part of the student debt crisis are families making poor economic choices. I am not sure families are the ones to blame here. Astronomical tuition and loan interests that cannot be forgotten in bankruptcy is a predatory combo. In the European countries you mention no student start their professional like with $50k-100k in unforgivable debt.
- donedealomg 6y ago
  Yeah sorry that in Europe people go to local univerities, live at home, take the bus to school and don't travel the world and buy useless things on a student loan. In my opinion, Americans could do exactly the same to a local community college and have basically no debt.
- ineedasername 6y ago

jldugger 6y ago

> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. It helps to recall that taxes pay for this 'free' service. American tuition has risen pretty much in lock step with state funding cuts, which itself is often motivated by a combination of partisan politics, constitutionally mandated balanced budgets, federally prohibited bankruptcies, and negative economic shocks.

echelon 6y ago

$40k/yr pays for the name of the school. You can go to a great in-state public university for $6/yr or less. Pedigrees are dumb. Humanities degrees for more than $6k/yr are absurd. Georgia Tech offers a fully accredited online masters CS program for $6k as the total program cost, and their teaching is world-class.

formercoder 6y ago
Pedigree is one word, network is another.
barumi 6y ago
> Pedigrees are dumb. "Pedigree", and other terms used to refer to the same concept, are nothing more than the reflection of the track record of an institution regarding scientific quality and training. "Pedigree" also reflects a pre-screening of candidates with regards to academic and technical potential. It might be true that I won't become the next Niels Bohr if I attend the same universities he attended or lectured in, but let's not fool ourselves into assuming that you'll learn the same from a course taught by amateur underperforming lecturers than what you would from a course taught by nobel laureates to a room of top-performers.
- Leherenn 6y ago
  I don't think the quality of the lecturers matters that much. It's all about the students for me: good students create an environment and expectations that drive the whole thing. An excellent teacher isn't going to drag average students to amazing, but conversely a decidedly average teacher will not make amazing students average. Also, I am not convinced your average Nobel laureates is a particularly good teacher. If anything, from experience, research focused professors often see teaching as a chore and it has a clear impact on the quality of their teaching. If we're talking about teaching calculus 101, I'd much rather have a no-name professor who is a good pedagogue and loves teaching than a Fields medal winner. Of course, in reality, the fact you were taught by $famous professor is probably more valuable than what you actually learned in the class.
- raverbashing 6y ago

adventured 6y ago

If the European university systems are so great, why are their results so horrible? Where's the great wealth, economic growth, high productivity, and high incomes? The majority of Europe is languishing very badly and it's getting worse by the year. > $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. It's not free at all, and everyone knows it's not free. Let's see you do the final tally, which includes income across a lifetime vs tax rates. Europeans pay epic taxes in part for that 'free' college. The US middle class pays very low taxes by comparison. That has to be factored into the equation. The US middle class is richer than the middle class in: Sweden, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Greece, Poland and Czechia among numerous others. The US median wealth figure is comparable to Norway. I think it's important to restate that: the US middle class is richer than the middle class in Sweden, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark - you know, just four of the supposedly best off nations in world history. So where are the great results for that non-free education?

ojbyrne 6y ago
Important to realize that that lifetime income is spread over a shorter lifetime: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex... Also citations?
adamnemecek 6y ago
I legit font get where most of the purported US wealth is concentrated, most US cities are dilapidated. By how much do you think are European taxes higher than US taxes?
- cyberdrunk 6y ago
  > I legit font get where most of the purported US wealth is concentrated, most US cities are dilapidated Isn't this because US cities (esp. the dilapidated ones) are in big part storage for the poor, and the middle class lives in suburbs?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

csa 6y ago

> $40K/year for similar academics you get almost for free in Europe. If you pay $40k a year in the US and think that you are paying for an education, then, yes, you will be disappointed. For schools at that price point, you are paying for the network. Whether the network delivers or not is a different issue — sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very context-specific.