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Without going into the metrics that these rankings use and their flaws, the German university system unfortunately focuses less on "elite" universitities, inste
by jbangert 12y ago
Without going into the metrics that these rankings use and their flaws, the German university system unfortunately focuses less on "elite" universitities, instead trying to create a good average experience, so most of the universities are actually fairly on-par with each other in terms of funding, and therefore also research output, teaching, etc. That being said, my experience with high-prestige american universities has been that the expense has very little to do, and feeds very little into, the quality of the education. US universities are expensive because they have massive bureaucratic overhead and are funded through a peculiar model (Government gives money to people, which give money to universities).
Also, Germany used to have no tuition until the mid-2000s or so, and only some places introduced it, and it was really, really low.
- tegeek 12y agoI think you are right. Sweden is more or less has the same model as German when it comes to higher education. There are no particular "elite" universities & most of the universities are more or less on the same level when it comes to funding, research output, teaching etc. Even as an International student back in 2008, I paid 0$ in tuition fees & used to pay 30$ as student union fee per study term/semester and have best study experience I can imagine.
- riffraff 12y agoand yet Karolinska University is 36th in the above list (the top university in the EU-sans-UK) while Stockholm University is 106th. The higher education list is quite unrelated to normal person perception, imo.
- 2ion 12y agoThe aversion towards the promotion of a few selected university is also apparent in the fact that the only wide-scale national program for financing elite structures, the "excellence initiative", is subject to quite a bit of criticism (recent piece in the Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/exzellenzinitiative-elite-uni-programm-soll-ueberprueft-werden-a-993047.html http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/exzellenzinitiative...).