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-- The European Higher Level Education Model
The European Higher Level Education Model
Now I know that the US education system is often discussed and typically much maligned (and with respect to the primary and secondary education level I would tend to agree), however, I feel that the higher level education system is quite excellent with plenty of opportunities available to a lot of segments to the population regardless of it not being a "free" education as Europe is. What I mean by this is that the education system works something like this: There are more or less three tiers of schools, private universities, public universities, and community colleges. Private schools are the most expensive, then public schools, then community colleges. Private schools are sometimes better but not always better than public schools (for example UPenn is an ivy league school) with community colleges typically focusing on trade skills. Given the intelligence of a person, that person can get into any type of school regardless of wealth. If you're a genious, schools will be flooding you with scholarships even if you're poor. Every other type of person can essentially get a combination of scholarships and loans. Of course if you are average, a prestigious university may not grant you admission/scholarships/loans, however public universities form a good safety net of admitting students who are not the "elite" shall we say. At the lower rung of education, those who are less than intelligent can gain acceptance to community college and "work their way up" to better schools or simply learn a practical trade skill. Therefore, you typically have a large segment of the population getting a higher education while maintaining the academic integrity and competition of the better schools. That being said, I recently read an article on some developing problems with the education system in the EU:
Who pays to study?
Jan 22nd 2004
From The Economist print edition
When universities depend on taxpayers, their independence and standards suffer
IT IS depressing to visit Oxford or Cambridge these days. The old buildings are so wonderfully grand that they highlight the cheap, ugly and badly kept new ones. The intellectual history is stunning, too: this is where Newton pondered gravity, and Occam honed his razor. But these days academics at Britain's two finest universities are a harried, ill-paid lot; salaries start at a mere �14,139 ($25,733).
Few disagree that both universities are living off the past, in everything from cash to reputation. The colleges' wine cellars are better than the kitchens, quips one don. The port and claret were laid down in happier times, when cash was flush and planning for the future mattered. But the food that goes with them is often dismal: that must be bought out of current income, which is usually earmarked already for everything from maintaining ancient buildings to supplementing salaries.
Yet Oxford and Cambridge are still in relatively good shape, thanks largely to their structure of self-governing, self-financing colleges. This limits the power of bureaucrats, provides independently managed money and ensures some protection for the original and the excellent. Other British universities have much worse problems.
To begin with, they have little or no endowment income to fall back on. The combined investments of Oxford and Cambridge are �4 billion; the rest of the British university system has �1.7 billion to play with. In America, Harvard alone has twice Britain's total. The �funding gap��the hole in the universities' collective accounts created by the unfunded expansion of the past 20 years�is around �10 billion.
It is not just that money is short. The price and quantity of courses are state-controlled, in a system more suited to Soviet central planning than to a modern democracy. And as with other planned economies, the result of government intervention is increasingly unsatisfactory. In Britain, over 30 years, universities have gone from being almost wholly autonomous, with state-financed block grants handed out at arm's length, to becoming branch offices of a government ministry.
Admissions, too, bring a whiff of the old Soviet system. The government is convinced that more working-class students, including many with few formal qualifications, should go to university. Its ultimate target is 50% of 18-30-year-olds by 2010, and it is getting there fast. Figures released this week show that the number of students in higher education has risen in just one year from 43% to nearly 45% of the relevant age cohort. In 1979, the percentage of school-leavers going on to higher education was just 12.4%.
But more does not always mean better. One of Britain's best-known academic institutions, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, found itself penalised for taking too few students from �non-traditional� (meaning poor) backgrounds. So it reduced entry requirements for such applicants, to take account of their often modest school results. But then it turned out that those students found learning Arabic or Chinese from scratch so hard that they were dropping out, incurring a further fine from the government.
The story of British higher education is less about expansion than inflation of qualifications. University degrees mean less and less and there are more and more of them. The rot set in in 1992, when the Conservative government allowed the polytechnics�locally based institutions that originally specialised in vocational teaching�to relabel themselves universities. That created a panoply of new academic courses, many of dubious merit, and kicked away a vital pillar of the higher education system, between the purely vocational further education colleges and the fully academic universities. This trend towards uniformity has disastrously weakened higher education in Britain.
Hence the importance of the government's proposed reform of university finance, which will allow a modest liberalisation of tuition fees. Instead of the current flat rate of �1,125, universities will be allowed to charge up to �3,000. The scheme is festooned with carrots, chiefly easy terms for poor students, in order to forestall a revolt by the government's nominal supporters in Parliament.
Critics say the new fees will create an unmanageable debt burden. Yet a broadly similar system in Australia has not had this effect: graduates pay back the loans when they are earning enough.
The scheme's real weakness, as most of the best universities admit in private, is that the top fee should be a lot higher; the cost of actually teaching an undergraduate is at least �10,000 in the humanities, more in engineering and science. But the most welcome ingredient is variability: universities will at last have the chance to offer cheaper, shorter courses to students willing to pay. The misguided notion that all courses at all universities are equally good seems about to be punctured.
Woes across the Channel
The present picture in Britain may be dismal, but misery is relative. Strolling happily through the Oxbridge quadrangles, and in the bustling corridors of less beautiful British universities, are 12,000 undergraduates from other European Union (EU) countries. Their home universities are in a still worse state: not only more overcrowded, but with barely a vestige of direct teaching. Oxford and Cambridge, more than other British universities, still offer undergraduate students close attention from a designated don.
The system is threadbare and arguably wasteful, especially as many students do little to prepare for their supervisions. But at least it happens. At France's best-known university, the Sorbonne, a translation seminar at the start of last term had 80 registered students. �Too many,� said the teacher superciliously. �Half of you have to leave. When we are down to 40 I'll start teaching. Foreigners will go first.�
In Germany, too, where professors enjoy the status of tenured civil servants, conditions are frequently dreadful. A current scandal is the Blockseminar�an ingenious system whereby an academic turns up briefly at the university and delivers an entire term's teaching in the space of a weekend, before returning to the unhurried pursuit of private knowledge.
Similar stories come from Spain and Italy, where universities are plagued by rigidity and corruption. Last year, students at Rome's Sapienza University were found to have paid up to �3,000 ($3,400) to pass their exams; and a professor at the University of Bari was arrested for demanding sexual favours in exchange for getting candidates onto the psychology course.
In effect, universities in these countries have become government-owned degree mills. Their aim is to get the greatest number of young people in and out for the least money and trouble. Really determined students may fight their way through to gain a professor's attention, win a research scholarship and start doing some real work, probably in postgraduate study. The others will arrive in the labour market, qualification in hand, feeling that their mostly middle-class parents have something to show for their taxes.
It is not all gloom and doom. Most countries have islands of excellence: German postgraduate engineering faculties, for example, or the French grandes �coles, fiercely competitive and independent. Finland and Holland have largely managed to keep quality up and bureaucracy down. But for the most part, universities in the larger countries of continental Europe are a dreadful warning of the consequences of nationalisation.
No wonder, then, that British and European academics cast envious and wondering eyes at the American university system. It manages both quantity and quality: more than 60% of American high school graduates at least start some form of tertiary education. And it keeps standards high, too. The European Commission recently published a painstaking ranking of the world's best universities, compiled by researchers in Shanghai. Of the top 50, all but 15 were American. From Europe, only Oxford and Cambridge made it into the top 10; from other EU countries, no university ranks higher than 40.
The American system is not flawless. The diversity which makes the system so dynamic also leaves it vulnerable to abuse. In the humanities, intellectual fashion seems bizarrely distant from the real world. Many bad ideas�notably political correctness�started life as American campus fads. And budget pressures squeeze the system when times are tough. This year, the axe has fallen hard on California's public universities.
Yet for all that, the numbers going into American higher education continue to rise, and the average tuition fee in an American university is around $4,500�some $1,000 less than the proposed maximum to be charged in England. Fees in the California state system, even after two steep recent rises compelled by leaner budgets, are less than $3,000, and a third of the income from them goes into grants for students who cannot afford even that.
Degrees of difference
Why does America succeed where Europe fails? The most important factor is diversity. American higher education is not just more varied, but has less of the crippling snobbery and resentment that accompanies variety in, say, Britain. At the bottom of the pyramid are community colleges, offering inexpensive, flexible, job-focused courses for millions of Americans each year. They are pretty basic, and Britons sniff at them. But the difference in mentality, says Martin Trow, an observer of both the British and American education systems, is that in America �something is seen as better than nothing�.
Crucially, too, the different bits of the system fit together. As Mr Trow points out, a student can start in a California community college, earn some credits, move on to state university and finish up taking a degree at Berkeley. Such a path would be inconceivable in most countries in Europe. In France, for example, the division between the state-funded, mass-market universities and the grandes �coles is vast and jealously guarded. Britain's further-education colleges are the poorest relations of an already impoverished family.
American universities are also fiercely competitive: for talented staff and students, for donations, for results (though competition on fees at the top end, where tuition can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year, is yet to come). Fund-raising efforts at the best-organised universities start even before students have graduated. Star professors attract star salaries.
That contrasts with the two extremes across the Atlantic. In Britain, performance is so minutely measured by the state that it stultifies the efforts of the brilliant, without really rooting out the incompetent and lazy. State supervision, coupled with penury, gives universities the smell of a failing nationalised industry, rather than of world-class outfits devoted to the risky business of thinking original thoughts.
In much of continental Europe, the problem is that senior university staff are not scrutinised enough. The intention, to keep academic freedom sacrosanct, is admirable, but the cocoon has become a prison. German academics are all but forbidden by law from getting involved in business. The best motivators for academic excellence are money, recognition and team spirit. But the German system penalises success in the name of equality: a university that does too well in the eyes of the federal bureaucracy will have its funding cut. So great is the risk of entrenched mediocrity that the chancellor, Gerhard Schr�der, has urged the creation of�horrors�ten new elite universities.
A crucial part of competition is flexibility in setting fee income. Most European countries charge little or nothing. But fees have two beneficial effects. The first is that the university is beholden to nobody in its planning. Engineering and medicine are expensive to teach, so they cost more. Law is in high demand, so it is rationed by price at places like Harvard. But these are the university's own decisions. If it wants to teach something expensive, it can raise the money from fees, or from outside donors, or subsidise it from its endowment. It is not left, as Britain's academic managers are, wondering if it can squeeze money from the English department to keep the chemistry labs open.
Fees also mean that students are much more motivated. Underpriced goods and services are usually wasted, and university education is no exception. In a new book*, Robert Stevens, an academic who has run colleges in both America and Britain, writes of �an alcoholic yobbish culture� among students, for whom university is principally �a rite of passage�, like national service in the army, rather than an education. When Austria introduced a modest tuition fee of �363 per term in 2001, the number of students enrolled dropped by a fifth. Many, it seemed, were signing up simply for benefits such as health insurance.
But fees will also make students more powerful customers. Teaching at American universities is much better presented than in most European ones. Visiting American students are often startled to attend lectures with no visual aids, out-of-date hand-outs and droning, inaudible speakers. Such complacency will not long survive when customers have a choice.
The last big issue is selection. In most of continental Europe, this is a taboo. Access is either entirely open to anyone who has passed the school-leaving exam, or, at most, is rationed according to the marks gained. Universities, in effect, have to take the students the government sends them.
That sounds good, but works badly. The advantage of university-based admissions is that academics end up choosing the people they really want to teach. Students are more likely to focus on the course they want to study, and to try to meet the university's specific requirements.
Dream on, spires
American universities, with their mighty reserves of talent and money, look well placed to compete with the world's new academic powerhouses in India and China (which last year alone produced 2m graduates). How can sleepy Europe and timid Britain even hope to keep up?
The best hopes are in the piecemeal changes that are already happening. Students, for example, are voting with their feet. Britain's Open University, which offers part-time courses by post and e-mail, says that young people of university age are its fastest-growing bunch of students, up nearly 5% this year. That suggests that the disadvantages of a dumbed-down full-time undergraduate course, with the attendant debts and time spent not earning, are beginning to bite.
Employers too are signalling that there are too many graduates with indifferent qualifications. With luck, the British government's ill-starred 50% target may turn from its original force-feeding of the universities to a harmless exhortation that people should do something educational at some point after they leave school.
The days of social engineering may also be drawing to a close. The British government's proposed �access regulator�, an official body originally designed to force the top universities to take fewer students from fee-paying schools and more from poor backgrounds, seems unlikely now to penalise anyone. Just as well. Harvard and Stanford are both shopping for talent at Britain's top private schools, where pupils have been deterred from studying in Britain by official contempt for their class.
New institutions have sprung up, too. In Germany, the city-state of Bremen has set up an independent private university in conjunction with Rice University of Texas. �We wanted to be able to select students, to charge tuition fees, to have excellent and competent professors, to teach in small groups and in decent working conditions,� says Fritz Schaumann, its director.
Five years after its foundation, the International University of Bremen has 500 students, who contribute just over �3.5m in fees. It raises a further �20m a year from endowment income and donations. Other German universities at first regarded the newcomer with great suspicion. Now they are co-operating, for example in joint research programmes. Eventually, says Mr Schaumann, they will have to adopt a similar model.
Old institutions are also behaving in new ways. Britain's London School of Economics (LSE), for example, has largely escaped from the state's clutches. It now gains most of its income by selling courses to students from outside the EU, whom it can charge market fees. With that money, it can afford to hire world-class staff. �This is the only way we can compete with American academic salaries,� says Sir Howard Davies, the LSE's director.
For Britain's best universities, the big question now is whether to wait for more denationalisation, or to move towards freedom on their own initiative. For Europe's universities, the question is whether they can stop talking about reform and actually introduce some. Meanwhile, America's universities, hugely wealthier, happier and brainier, march remorselessly on.
Comments? 
Edit: Oops screwed up the order of the article somewhat. Should make sense now.
And here's an opinion article about the recent British vote to establish university fees:
Pay or decay
Jan 22nd 2004
From The Economist print edition
If universities are to be truly free and sustainable, most students will have to pay fees
UNIVERSITIES the world over love symbols, from medieval scholastic garb at degree ceremonies to the owls, martlets, chevrons and scrolls of scholastic heraldry. But for many universities, especially in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, a more accurate emblem would include slummy buildings, dog-eared books and demoralised dons. That's why Britain's government is, next week, risking defeat in the House of Commons to bring more private money into the country's universities�and why European and developing countries, now busy expanding higher education, need to think hard about how much government involvement is good for universities.
There are, broadly, two models for running universities. They can be autonomous institutions, mainly dependent on private income, such as fees, donations and investments, or they can be state-financed and (as a result) state-run. America's flourishing universities exemplify the former, Europe's the latter (see article). Britain's government wants to move towards the American model. The subject of next week's rebellion is a bill that would allow English universities (Scotland and Wales are different) to charge up to �3,000 ($5,460) in tuition fees, instead of the current flat-rate �1,125. Students will borrow the money through a state-run loan scheme and pay it back once they are earning enough.
It is a very limited start, laced with sweeteners for students from poor backgrounds. The best universities worry that the maximum fee should be many times higher. But it reflects an important shift in thinking. First, that the new money universities need should come from graduates, rather than the general taxpayer. Second and most crucially, it abandons the egalitarian assumption that all universities are equally deserving.
That is commendable. Just because a course is cheap does not mean it is worthless; the existence of costly ones is not in itself a sign of iniquitous social division. Yet old thinking has deep roots. Bandying phrases such as �excellence for all� and �education for the many not the few�, politicians, especially left-wing ones, want to slap the university-educated label on ever more people, regardless of merit, cost or practicality.
The aspirin theory of university finance
Universities can indeed give the disadvantaged a leg up�but they will do it much better if the state stands back. Micromanaging university admissions, as the British government has been trying to do on grounds of class, with targets, quotas, fines and strictures, risks the same consequences as similar American experiments based on racial preference. It humiliates the talented but disadvantaged, whose success is then devalued; it infuriates the talented who are not deemed underprivileged enough and who feel their merits ignored, and it makes universities do a job they are bound to be bad at.
A good university will need little encouragement to hunt the best talent regardless of class (or race or gender) wherever it can find it. The government may want to subsidise that search, or subsidise loans and bursaries, or provide remedial teaching for borderline candidates. But by far the best route to fairness is not fiddling with the universities, but improving the state school system. When only half the British school population gains five decent exam passes at 16, and only a quarter gain two decent A-levels at 18, it is hardly surprising that the best universities recruit largely from the best schools�those (public and private) attended by the middle class.
Along with mistaken egalitarian assumptions, governments should also ditch another misconception: the utilitarian notion that universities' main merit is their economic usefulness. Amid much blather about the �knowledge economy�, the core of this belief is that more higher education means higher productivity and more wealth. This lies behind the British government's desire (unmatched by the necessary money) to have 50% of the 18-30 age group in university by 2010 and behind much German anxiety about that country's crowded but increasingly second-rate universities.
Alison Wolf, a British economist, terms this the �two aspirin good, five aspirin better� approach to university finance. It is deeply flawed. In reality, there is no proven connection between spending on universities and prosperity, nor can there be. Those rich countries that spend a lot on higher education may do so for the same reasons they subsidise opera: because they like it, rather than because it makes them richer.
This sounds heretical, but should not be very surprising. Just as people differ, so do their educational needs. An intensive three-year academic course may be just the ticket for one person, but a tedious waste of time for another. Indeed, faced with ageing populations, Britain and most European countries arguably should be encouraging their young people to start earning earlier in their lives rather than later.
Graduated differences
Public funding is addictive, and the withdrawal symptoms are painful. But as British dons and politicians struggle with these issues, and their European counterparts ponder whether, one day, they might just have to do something similar, the message for emerging economies like China and India, who are investing heavily in their own systems of higher education, is clear: avoid a nationalised and uniform system, and go for one that is diverse and independent. America's universities have their problems. Inflated tuition fees are a big worry; alumni preference looks unfair. But overall, America's system looks sustainable in a way that the Old World's does not.
In short, the model to strive for is varied institutions charging varied fees. Not all courses need last three years or bring a full honours degree. Some will be longer and deeper, others shorter and shallower. Some universities may specialise as teaching-only institutions, like America's liberal arts colleges. Others may want to concentrate mainly on research. All must have the right to select their intake.
It is better to do some things well rather than everything indifferently. It is because politicians have forgotten this that some of the world's oldest universities risk a future that is a lot less glorious than their past.
Yes yes I know, it's a crapload of reading ... my apologies.
like I'm going to read through that...
But I will say I think the USA does have a better Higher Education than Europe, afterall the US gets all the best and brightest minds around the world in its institutions, including those European minds (i know how rate they are but they do exist...
)
And that my friends is the downfall of socialism. Obligatory lowering of standards to meet available funds.
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| Originally posted by NeoPhono And that my friends is the downfall of socialism. Obligatory lowering of standards to meet available funds. |
Here's something else to consider. American research is the best in the world, with the brightest people and the most funding both from public and private sources. Great resources tend to bring the best students. This Time Europe article explains it all really well:
How To Plug Europe's Brain Drain
It is important to say and recognize that the US higher education has a very high standard, which also gives you a diploma thats recognized world wide. And thats one of the main reasons why US gives scholarships, and loves heaving Inmigrant kids bring their intelligence and brightness along with them, here, to the US. Just go to silicon valley, those Indians are smart!! as well as the Japaneses, or Chineses. Overall, yes, I agree that the US's Higher education has a very high standard, which is the total opposite of US's secondary education.. which is one of the poorers.
interesting article i skimmed it a little
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| Given the intelligence of a person, that person can get into any type of school regardless of wealth. If you're a genious, schools will be flooding you with scholarships even if you're poor. |
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| In my judgment I would say C because of the fact that the strengths and weaknesses of both capitalism and socialism tend to cancel each other out. Let it be known however that I am speaking in a "public wellness" context rather than a trade and monetary context. |
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| Just go to silicon valley, those Indians are smart!! as well as the Japaneses, or Chineses. Overall, yes, I agree that the US's Higher education has a very high standard, which is the total opposite of US's secondary education.. which is one of the poorers. |
hmm interesting, as i see it, it's a lot better to have an education for everyone. I mean, the quality may be a bit less for the elite, but still the overall quality is better in europe than in the USA (and by that i also mean that more people get educated in europe).
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| Originally posted by tathi Americans have to stop stealing our scientists |
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| Originally posted by St_Andrew hmm interesting, as i see it, it's a lot better to have an education for everyone. I mean, the quality may be a bit less for the elite, but still the overall quality is better in europe than in the USA (and by that i also mean that more people get educated in europe). |
honestly, i still find europeans to be smarter than americans.
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| Originally posted by DrummeRaver86 honestly, i still find europeans to be smarter than americans. |
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| Originally posted by imokruok Here's something else to consider. American research is the best in the world, with the brightest people and the most funding both from public and private sources. |
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| Originally posted by occrider Now, think logically for a second, why do you suppose that is? |
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| Originally posted by occrider Now, think logically for a second, why do you suppose that is? |
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| Originally posted by trancaholic As to the main point of the thread: I work in research in a Danish university, as a supervisor/teacher, and have been through the Danish education system. In my mind there is a lot of things wrong with it, but none of them are echoed in the article, whereas the problems mentioned in the article are mostly unheard of in this country. I guess that there is no such thing as an "European education system". |
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That being said, if one of my students had handed in an article such as this one, I would be all over him for the omissions and unjustified generalizations that it contain. I cannot believe that it is written in an investigative spirit, by a unbiased author. It seems to take as apriori facts that the *quality* of education in Europe is bad, and from there it philosophises on why that may be so, and seems to end up with it being the lack of privatization of educational institutions, sprinkled with "sunshine"-stories from single institutions around the EU. For me, that is worthless speculation, although it was nice to be provoked to reconsider my views on education. |
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As an aside, we have, in the research unit I'm in, a visiting professor from the US on sabatical with us. During a dinner, where I sat next to him, he described the institution he resides in normally (some 25000 students at the institute he works in). He used the words "it's not education, it's a factory", which somehow suggest to me that the education system in the US is not that great. Furthermore, when visiting the San Francisco Bay area two years ago, I received a guided tour at the computer science department of Berkeley. From what I saw, I would not hesitate in stating that the physical framework of the university I work in, is more suited for education than that which I observed at Berkeley. In addition to this, the description of the education at Berkeley left me with some reservations. The students had relatively little courses, and were mostly left with reading books on their own - which, in my view, is a pretty inefficient way of teaching stuff. True, the lectures were given by hot shots in computer science, and a lot of familar names were posted on the doors at the department, but intellect and fame sadly give no guarantee of good teaching skills. |
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Can't figure this one out. Help! |
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| Originally posted by occrider First it takes the result of a study published by the European Commission which revealed that out of the top 50 universities in the world, only Oxford and Cambridge made it into the top 10 whilst no other EU country had a university ranked higher than 40. Of the top 50 in total, all but 15 universities were American. So then ... wouldn't it be a fair conjecture to say that there must be something being done right in the US university system as compared to the EU to yield such results? |
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| Originally posted by occrider It seems logical that the likely problem is due to funding and how the curriculum is designed. How does the European model in general derive funding and curriculum? Through the government. |
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| Originally posted by occrider Ultimately it's not your own experience of visiting one department of one university in the US or the words of one visiting teacher that is indicative of the quality of the system as a whole. It's the results that they yield and how these schools compare with each other. |
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| Originally posted by occrider Because most Europeans he's probably been exposed to are likely from his tenure at the american international school in vienna. Most students there are probably a lot brighter in general than the dumbasses at his high school in podunk Jersey hehe. |
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| Originally posted by trancaholic It *would* be fair to say that something is being done right in the US universities. I would never contest that, and I hope that wasn't the way my post came across. However, before I subscribe to the view that something is wrong with european universities, I would love to know what measure these universities were ranked by? Frankly, I would find such information more relevant, than that the researchers were from Shanghai or the "fact" that it was painstaking. Was it the yearly throughput of students? The average starting salary of the graduates? Production of above average referred papers? Or was it brand-recognition by company executives? Any one of these would be an obvious measure if you regard universities as "factories" - which I guess most politicians do - but none of them reflects what I believe to be the main qualities of universities as educational institutions. That the US universities have more money and that the graduates are more sought out by the private sector, I don't think can be solely ascribed to the quality of the education. I think it has much to do with the nature of the educational matters - applied research are naturally more appealing to companies than basic research which might be used in ten years and might never be used at all. |
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Again, I can only speak on behalf of the university I work at, but we do have external funding, and also from funding institutions. We do not have any tuition fees, but receive a fixed sum from the government per candidate we "produce". The curriculum is set (and continuously revised) by the university study boards, inside regulations set forth by the government. However, these regulations are of a "lower bound"-nature and as such present little limitation on the curriculum. |
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Yes, I realize that I cannot generalize from two examples, which was why I put it as an aside It did complement the sweeping generalizations in the article nicely, though... |
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| Originally posted by occrider Well from what I can figure out, the methodology from the rankings published by the European commission were: "several indicators of research performance, including the number of highly cited researchers, academic performance, the prevalence of articles published in the scientific journals Science and Nature, and the number of Nobel laureates produced within the hallowed halls of these centres of learning." Whether these indicators are truly indicative of the quality of a university I guess is somewhat subjective. |
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 I must agree, and I think it's somewhat interesting to take note of the two journals posted here - Science and Nature. Now naturally, I know it's probably understood why they chose these two journals as their marker - they are the most prestigious and the most strictest in the peer-reviewed process in comparison to other scientific journals. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the research is the most compelling in these two journals, nor does it mean that researchers are always trying to shoot for these 2 journals with their work. It's common knowledge now that research has overtaken the priority of teaching in US colleges. I can't speak for foreign higher education. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but throughout my years in college and personally knowing a number of my professors, I've noticed a trend of declining teaching skills as a result of the focus shift on research. Whether or not this is because professors themselves focus their time less on teaching, or the universities hire those researchers who bring in the big grants with fewer teaching skills, I don't know. My guess is it's a little of both. But I've personally experienced it with a couple of professors who just simply can't teach a lick, yet they bring in millions in grants to the school and will never get scrutinized as a result. Now does this necessarily have a huge impact on the students as a whole? Honestly I don't know, but I do find it discouraging, as I'm sure my sentiments are shared by others. So despite US universities having a leg up on their foreign competitors, I thought I'd just share that little tidbit. |
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As for the article you posted, it's too long for me to read and I'm just too damn laaaaazy. Don't you have any pictures instead? I like those better. |
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 It's common knowledge now that research has overtaken the priority of teaching in US colleges. I can't speak for foreign higher education. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but throughout my years in college and personally knowing a number of my professors, I've noticed a trend of declining teaching skills as a result of the focus shift on research. |
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| Originally posted by trancaholic Ah, didn't know that - makes me feel less depressed about my lack of logical thinking ability. |
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