Student debt is an issue but you have to also examine which field of study those students are getting degrees in. Eventually one has to determine the cost benefits of the degree they pursue. I am not excusing the leading parties that prey on potential students but to spend $200K on a degree that leads to a job that doesn’t pay is not a wise decision .
When I graduated, by debt was about 3-5X my annual salary. But I got my degree in a field that paid well, so it was paid off quickly. Best investment I ever made; I'd do it the same way if I had to do it again. Aside from getting a useful degree, my other secret: Keep living like a poor student for awhile after you graduate and start working. Tempting to get that new car, buy a house, etc... but don't do it. Get that debt and its interest paid off and start splurging after.
poor people don't have to pay for university in the usa if they are smart enough to shop around for the school that will give them a scholarship. but there are also universities were any student who gets accepted doesn't pay if their family income is below a certain level (like $60k a year).
Wrong on this. The US student debt problem was caused by stupid students taking on stupid degrees that would not offer the kind of wages allowing them to pay back. When there are so many students in women studies, arts, chicano studies, etc.... these are not practical. If you would ask students in the STEM field, they have absolutely no problem with debt at all. Do you think the top students mentioned in this video have debt problem? Not likely. Do you know why? Because they usually get full scholarships for being talented and their contributions to the researches
I have had the pleasure of studying in both Europe and the USA. One difference is that in the US you are exposed to practical cases and learn to solve problems. Europe is pure theory.
There's a funny joke that goes "American engineer or economist or whatever goes to a symposium in Europe to present his latest breakthrough in his field. The Europeans listen politely as he rattles off experimental result after experimental result that changes EVERYTHING. When he's done, one of the Europeans says 'That's all well and good, but how does it work in theory?'" Did Edison need to know Maxwell's Laws? Indeed, DID he? Ford thermodynamics? You never hear the word much any more, but Americans were once distinguished as being a particularly ingenious lot, much as Germans were exceptionally industrious (they remain so). Though not said (it sounds SO 19th Century, early 20th), it remains characteristic of American business and entrepreneurs.
One problem that wasn't mentionned here is that culturally, almost every "normal" student is expected to register in a univercity at 17-18 (i live in Belgium). You will very rarely see people who tried a few years "to work in the real world" only to come back to university. It just doesn't happen (almost never) So basically even if we have no idea what to do we still have to follow the fixed curriculum to get the degree. That + the cheapness of studies makes a LOT of drop offs. Also yeah 80-90% of teachers at an engineering school comes from the "frat" of that school (not a US frat, more responsable but still). That's just how it is. If you don't you're an outsider
I am a Canadian researcher who did his undergraduate and master's in Canada and now doing PhD in Europe. I consider to have experienced both cultures. In my view, it's true in general that Europe is seriously lagging behind but the video contains a lot of cliches on european culture they just projected on european academic culture and missed some key weaknesses. For starters, it's not true lazy european academics can simply get a job here by asking the right person. There are no handouts here. Also, salaries is not really a factor in motivating academics. Why would we sacrifice 10+ years of our prime working years living in the poverty line working 60 hours per week doing PhDs and post-docs if in the end we were interested in making the highest salary? Finding any position is extremely difficult so we really don't have the luxury in picking the university offering the highest salary. Believe me I wish that were the case. Most people just take whatever job they are lucky enough to find same as in the US. There's also a problem in definitions. Europe gives more weight to research institutes than universities for the research aspect of academia. The German Max Planck Society and French CNRS are both in Nature's 2023 top 5 research institutes (above stanford) but are not technically universities so don't show up in any university rankings. Other institutes such as the CEA, Pasteur or Francis Crick Institute are incredible but highly specialized so don't show up in many rankings either. I think the biggest weakness is language and funding. US spends 3.5% of GDP in R&D while the EU spends 2.3% with of course some huge regional disparities as northern Europe forming the bulk of R&D spending. The US also has a vast military-industrial complex that invests lots of money in research. Save for France, no EU country really has this type of partnership and it's in only a very limited extent. American universities have a huge advantage in that they get a lot of foreign undergraduate students paying bank to study there in english, the world's lingua franca. Some truly outstanding european universities like KUL, TUM or USaclay will never have this source of revenue since classes aren't taught in english unfortunately.
Ok but you know you are canadian . So you dont know anything about usa . Just bc u live beside usa doesn't mean usa is same as canada . I hope you understand what i m trying to say here .
The total student debtload of the U.S. is 1.77 trillion. This is a drag on the young (and even older) people who cannot buy homes, have children, or start a future. This is all because of the massive amount of tuitions these universities charge. the U.S. Might have the "best" universities, but there are tradeoffs
@@timo3724 Very few will earn much above the average. The reason Australia, Canada and Ireland are also in top 100 universities, above Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, China, etc. is because of English. If they didn't have ENglish they wouldn't be that popular. The US system burn bright, but fast. It will crash.
Student debt is problem mostly for peolple who studied at "shitstudies". Now income share agreement are better alternative that student debt - no ban will give money for "shitstudies".
There is a big part where the best universities are the best is because they are ranked as the best. They get the best students because they have the most applicants. They get the best professors because they are the most desirable. They get the largest donations because the best universities There students go on to do great things because they are from the best universities. There is little in the system that actually measures whether these universities actually do good job at teaching students. I would expect that this trend will continue as AI will allow actually education of students to be done without universities, so the value of going to a mediocre or poor university continues to fall.
@@georgerogers1166 It seems like Griggs v. Duke Power is one of the key factors behind the rise of the current credentialism. So, I'd argue it drives the down the value of going to a poor or mediocre university even further in an era of video lectures, good text books, and AI lead training like Brilliant. But, I guess if SCOTUS can come up with Griggs v. Duke Power, there is at least a possibility that SCOTUS could come up with a decision that invalidated making decisions based on what college you went to. Mess things up a lot, forcing colleges to actually qualify their graduates?
Title should be: Why the US has the world's most expensive universities. There is no such thing a "better" university. 1+1 is always equal to 2, and wether you learn that at MIT or in the most remote backwater countryside of Siberia makes no difference. The knowledge you acquire will always be the same, wether you spend $80,000 per year on tuition or not. The only things that do change are campus benefits (universities may offer more comfortable accomodation, better food at the cafeteria, more sport clubs, class trip options...) and prestige, as well as connections for future careers. But in no way do the "best" universities in the world offer more knowledge to the degree you are pursuing. Sometimes they even teach you less! I know that because I study astrophysics, and the astrophysics taught at Harvard that I saw online is Kindergarden knowledge compared to what we study in our classes in Germany where we pay less than $300 yearly tuition. No, not $300k, only 300 quid. If you think you will become some brilliant brain by joining these elite universities, think again. Yeah you will get connections to the elite of society and it will help you a lot in climbing the social ladder to make your access to wealth much easier, no doubt, but you will not be any smarter than others who studied the same things as you at any other university.
This couldnt stray further from reality. The qwuality of education varies drastically throughout the system. You seem to be under the impression that all degrees follow comply with some kind of universal curriculum or syllabus. In reality every professor, school, and degree are unique. Any of the Ivy league schools, MIT, Stanford etc. Have historically produced exponentially more brilliant people/research than your average community and state university, and will continue to do so.
Yea, this is just wrong. I got a Computer Science degree at SWT (now Texas State) in 1996 and interviewed in Austin. During two interviews, I was told that they love SWT students because our CS program was so practical, and that U.T. Austin students are only good at writing proofs, calculating Big-Oh, and drawing flowcharts. There is a HUGE difference between schools -- and those two are less than 50 miles from each other in a state as big as ours!
If all you are doing at MIT is learning kindergarten arithmetic, you are throwing a lot of money away for no good reason. You say you study astrophysics, so I can just sort of see why you might think that ("one university is as good as another regardless of money") in a mostly theoretical field. But a school that can spend $100s millions on lab equipment, computers, and attracting the best professors is going to have different opportunities and outcomes than one that can barely scrape together $10 million, especially in cutting edge fields.
I graduated from a bottom tier state university. I could google every answer to my online classes and most of the in person courses gave everyone an a for whatever reason
... you make me want to do that lol... meanwhile I've been grinding for years at a degree that is soul crushingly difficult, to the extent everything else in my life I have done so far is just not as hard (I'll take work! Work is easier!). And for what? I have no idea. Crossing my fingers this year will have less crying in the bathroom than last year.
6:24 Hi, I am from Germany. This happened during my high school ("Oberstufe") years: Our biology teacher was making dangerous claims about masks that weren't true and just wasting the whole lesson (90 mins) ranting about having to wear a mask. I wish I was joking but I am not. And not just one lesson. Every lesson. This was especially a problem because a lot of us students needed those lessons to prepare for our finals! He did make some more strange comments about other topics but mostly him wasting our study time was the problem. I reported him and he only got suspended for a day. A day. Bruh, it did nothing. I was so pissed. I am glad I am in university now and can more or less choose my teachers. Thank goodness!
Why are you mentioning your high school story? This conversation is solely about universities and why the US ones are supposedly better than the alternatives. German universities are top-notch, and are very cheap for any student, regardless of whether they’re domestic or international. The reason they don’t appear as high as contenders like Oxbridge, Ivy League and so on is because of language of instruction and separation pf purely research based institutions and purely teaching institutions. Research output is a major component of university rankings, and German universities usually do a lot more teaching than research, as they have Institutes for such duties.
Problems also come in how they rank universities. American universities are tailored towards research and development the students are just the income stream to facilitate this and keeping the centre of the crop in there post graduateprograms. Where European universities are more dependent on student outcomes, getting there best students into private sector allowing wider networking for the postgraduates.
the US has hundreds of colleges that have no real research being done by the faculty, they are oriented toward teaching. many have been around over 200 years, so this isn't new. i went to one for undergrad before going to a research university for a phd.
Disagreed. If the students are just income stream for US and student outcomes are for EU, shouldn't EU perform better? The number indicated otherwise. Don't you know how much US universities and private sectors interwine? Where do you think the US unversities get their money from? Private sector actively recruits, invests, and works with US universities. Another fact is if the US universities are not shackled with the political correctness BS and affirmation action with student admission, the level of talents would be even higher.
If we are talking about Ivy League, then yes, bigger public schools (UF, UT, USC) is a yes as well, but 90% of colleges are far to small with out the kind of budget or students that you are alluding to.
According the Shanghai index Sweden is remarkable high ranked, twice as high as US with half of the resources. Would be interesting to hear your opinion why this is the case.
Uk have loads that are great. Cambridge, Oxford, KCL, imperial, UCL, LSE, UOB, Queen Mary's, and UOM. In fact, cambridge, oxford, ucl and Imperial are all in the top 10 in the world, quite an achievement given how much larger usa is and how many hundreds of millions of more people it has.
I happen to study at a state-owned economics and business school in Europe. There was one professor who let only one student pass out of 300 students who took an exam in the course of FInancial accounting. They can do this because they are employed by the state and often enjoy a culture of impunity. Universities are state-owned and in that sense affordable to most people. That doesn't change the fact that they are a state enterprise, so it common for our bathrooms to not have toilet paper due to the bureaucratic procedure of public procurement. The fact is that many of such state-owned universities are well-accredited because of their tradition of contributing to academia. The same goes for private universities in the United States: they have their tradition.
i'l call it bullshit. I study at a public university in Portugal (one of the countries with the strictest worker policies in all of Europe) and having already studied at an economics college, and currently at an engineering college, any professor who is caught doing something like that, in addition to being fired, is expelled from the order of researchers, probably for life, due to lack of academic conduct. Strict employability policies, as typically happens in public servants, are not a shield, you cannot do what you want without expecting consequences. I smell that you are simply a random American wanting to spread the "fear" of the left. And this is coming from someone who hates the current system
@@afonsoabreu5144 He is talking about Germany, and implicitly glorifying everything socialist (unterminable, unaccountable Professors) justified with the argument that *everyone can afford it* , which also means absence of standardised merit based admission process. Any wonder German corporate world is near 100% homogeneous, far more than UK, USA, even Switzerland and Netherlands. Because everything is subjective, and there are zilch transparence or accountability.
@afonsoabreu5144 well in Italy similar things happen. Professors do whatever they want, I had multiple exams with 90% of the class rejected, and they have nearly zero accountability.
@@marcoac-sx6lq The same thing happens in Portugal. But taking difficult exams and letting someone you want through just because you like them are very different things. But in some Portuguese colleges you have some type of protection in this regard. Last year there was a subject with around an 80% failure rate so the students made a joint complaint to the university council and these teachers were removed from the department of that subject. They were not fired, just relocated to another area of the college
Having worked in both European and American universities, this video got a lot of things wrong. For one, most of the problems he mentioned European universities have so do American ones. Most professors in America don't have incentives to teach well since their contracts depend on how many papers they publish. Not the quality of their teaching or how impactful their research is. Mainly the quantity. Hence the 'publish or perish' mentality. And why it's common for students to complain about mediocre professors. But because of tenure, universities cannot fire incompetent teachers. The rise in adjuncts has changed this somewhat but the trade-off has been decreasing the pay and benefits, making such positions less desirable. University inbreeding is also widespread in the Ivy League and state schools. It's just somewhat spread out, you'll see mainly Ivy League graduates in the Ivy Leagues and major state school or Ivy League graduates in state schools. Applicants usually get these positions through contacts (their supervisors know someone who owes them a favor) or how many papers they published (not how good they are). Everyone else typically gets the scrap positions (adjunct). What does differentiate American universities from European ones is the competitiveness they create (most of which is artificial), more independence on how to carry out business, and how rich they are. The latter definitely makes a huge difference which is noticeable when comparing a European university to an average American one (European usually provides better quality of education). Lots of money allows them to create the best labs possible. Patents and startups come out of such labs which brings in even more money. That along with the oversaturation of PhDs in the market (which universities are well aware of but keep promoting), drives wages down and increases competitiveness.
Many professors in the public universities just don’t teach or teach terribly. Some of the graduate students as teachers teach the undergraduates, which is unfair for the latter to pay so much for this kind of service, though some graduates do teach better than the professors 😂. Some disciplines definitely need the professors and researchers to research, but many just don’t need the endlessly produced trash papers. To sum up, if the American universities and its whole education system is not adjusting in the students’ favor, they are gonna dwindle. Online education will step in further.
@@Tony-lj5lr based on my experience, the quality of research is about the same as the average American university. Of course, research at universities like MIT and Stanford tends to be of much greater quality but mainly due to how much money they can spend on research. Otherwise, average American universities are quite comparable to European ones.
Great commentary, Josh! Admittedly, one drawback of the US system is the cost.. these top schools have yearly tuitions that can exceed $50k.. of course there can be aid and loans but it's still a crazy amount for the non-affluent.
Although the video mentioned a negative influence in performance from government oversight, simply implying that greater autonomy of universities drive quality is an oversimplification and misses the fundamental role of governance structures: a highly autonomous university under control from its own staff tends to become complacent and vulnerable to capture by their interest to maintain status quo and least effort and risk,, whereas more successful universities tend to be under the control of associations of former students whose interests are aligned with maximizing the results and reputation of their alma mater. This would have been an important dimension of analysis in such comparisons.
Too poor to afford a degree, and not smart enough for a scholarship is where I sit. Thankfully trade schools have really picked recently so I have that going for me.
For a long long time! The US gov. sees their universities as places of innovation! Especially today when America is on the bring of a Cold war, which according to many has already started, they would boost their investments into education
Ironic he keeps mentioning Harvard over and over again, given what they've been in the news for over the last couple of months. Give the Marxists more time to run things, and they'll make US universities just as bad as the European ones.
I'm an American expat currently living in Vienna, Austria. I did my undergraduate in NY and my graduate degree here in Austria, so I got to see first hand the differences between both systems. In my opinion, a good 70% of the shortcomings at European universities can be explained by a lack of finances. Another reason is the dogged belief that universities should be free and open to anyone who WANTS to attend, as opposed to those who DESERVE to attend. Here in Austria, as in the rest of Europe, universities are FREE and most times there are no tests required for admission. You might have to pay some sort of registration or administrative fee, but that's never more than $500 a semester. Compare that to the $10,000 a semester (after financial aid) I paid while studying in NY! But as they say, you get what you pay for. In NY we had 24 hour libraries, 2 or 3 olympic sized swimming pools located in two VAST, professional sport centers with every type of equipment imaginable, we had huge stadiums for track and field and football, we had our own TV and radio stations (yes, that's the plural!), our own post office with our own zip code, our own 24 hour bus system, our own police force, pubs, bars, restaurants, first class musical and opera performances in a 2000+ seat theater in addition to smaller theaters for chamber music, etc. ,we had dozens of sport offerings (everything from horse riding to rock climbing), then there were the sold out concerts from visiting rock & pop stars, the dozens upon dozens of independently run student organizations, the independently run student government, the independently run student newspapers, the tremendous Greek life, the acapella groups, the symphony orchestras, the choruses, the jazz and ballet and modern and improvisational dance troupes, and the list goes on and on. NONE OF THIS exists in European universities. And even where they do have some sort of clubs or extracurricular activities, they tend to be very minor affairs completely dependent on the discretion of the university administration. In Europe you simply go to university to attend classes, and then you go home. Student housing here is either non-existent or it's a joke, so most students have to find their own housing on the private market. Not only are universities here extremely underfunded, but they're also extremely crowded - the University of Vienna alone has over 90,000+ students, with lecture halls overflowing onto the streets. Being hired here as a professor has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with politics. Your tenure exists entirely at the pleasure of the ruling political party, and once you get hired, you're pretty much allowed to do whatever you want as the title of "Professor" comes with a plethora of privileges and carries a LEGAL distinction. Professors here both expect and are given the most obsequious deference and they act every bit the royal prince. They must not be contradicted and they must not be offended. Whatever they say, you do, and they must be addressed with the title of "Herr Professor" (Sir Professor) or "Frau Professor" (Madam Professor) at ALL TIMES, even in private and even outside the university environment. I used to proofread Master and PhD theses for graduate students and about 2/3 of the times their work contained faulty or factually wrong statements. Whenever I made corrections or confronted them about this, they explained that they were instructed by their professor to stick to the course book WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. Any deviation from his written material meant an automatic fail. On account of the chronic underfunding and massive amounts of students who more or less each have a RIGHT to attend university (because of the weird laws here guaranteeing "equality"), professors have NO TIME to devote their individual attention to their students. There are no such things here as TA's and graduate students are not required to teach, as they are in the US. So it's not unusual for a single professor to have to supervise 300 or 600 students, especially in the more popular majors. And even if the government tries to force students to pay a small nominal fee to provide universities with some desperately needed financing, students take to the streets and riot. I know a guy who hired a mutual friend of ours to write his Master's thesis. It was so sloppily and half-heartedly written that I was sure it would be rejected. His supervising professor barely spent 5 minutes flipping through the pages and before I knew it, I was attending his pompous graduation ceremony. This could have never happened in the US as graduate students have to defend their thesis in front of an academic jury, answering their unscripted questions to their satisfaction. But because professors here are so overworked and understaffed, they simply lack the time to provide detailed scrutiny of Master's/PhD theses, and so we have an epidemic of plagiarism in Europe. Every month some politician here gets exposed for plagiarism, and no wonder. Just to illustrate how bad things are in Europe, another friend of mine who wanted to study psychology had to wait SIX YEARS to get accepted into the program on account of the tens of thousands of applicants. And even when he finally did get in, there was the problem of finding student housing since if you come from a poor family, the miniscule grant you get from the government for housing is just a drop in the bucket compared to monthly rent prices. That's another problem by the way in Europe, the lack of meaningful financial aid for students. The financial aid I received from the US to attend school here in Austria was roughly equivalent to the average yearly salary after taxes - all my Austrian friends were envious and amazed. I remember I once had to write a paper, for which I needed a certain book. I went to the library and was surprised to discover that there was no one manning the librarian's desk. This was one of these libraries where you couldn't get the book yourself, a librarian had to get it for you. I went next door to the secretary's office and asked what was going on. "The librarian is out sick", she said. "Well, isn't there anyone else who could man the librarian desk?", I asked. "No", she replied, "because of budget cuts he's the only librarian on staff. Try again in two weeks!". Welcome to the absurdities of government-run universities! I can't imagine something similar ever happening in the US!
Sorry, Curtis, but you've given no reason as to why US universities are supposedly better, only a bevvy of reasons (justifications, mostly) as to why you have to pay so much just to attend. I'm not interested in swimming pools, police stations or separate postal codes if I'm saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that I'd have to pay off for decades to come. The fact of the matter is this: european and US universities are roughly the same when it comes to education. The difference lies in the ranking system. US universities place at the top mostly because of the research they do (something the ordinary student doesn't benefit from). In europe research is seperated from education and conducted by research facilities (for example the Max Planck Institutes). The question then is this: are you ready to pay for unnecessary, superficial stuff that ultimately doesn't affect your education? People need to answer that for themselves. I know where I stand on this - and given all the surveys conducted on the effectiveness of US higher education, it seems that american alumni come to the same conclusion.
@@roaldruss4211 All of those clubs, extra-curricular activities and "swimming pools" provide American students with immense advantages not available to their European counterparts, namely leadership abilities, real-world practice, social competence and professional networking. By participating in the plethora of clubs, sporting activities and Greek life, American students learn strength of character, they learn how to oversee and manage a work group, they learn how to negotiate various social situations, they meet and network with alumni and other important stakeholders, thereby providing a stepping stone to a meaningful career. Take my situation, for example, I was heavily involved in the arts in college, including the popular men's acapella group. Because of these experiences I learned how to present myself (through acting experience on stage), how to speak eloquently, how to behave in difficult social situations, how to cope with demanding time schedules (having to juggle a full study load plus excruciatingly demanding rehearsal schedules), I learned perseverance, how to give my best, how to pace myself under pressure (having to deal with difficult Broadway directors, repeating dance routines over and over and over again at 2AM to their satisfaction, etc.). As business manager of my acapella group I organized our annual tours that took us all over the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, this entailed contacting hundreds of performance venues, negotiating fees and terms with their managers, drafting contracts, working under immense stress trying to organize minute details, working the phones till midnight, resolving conflicts and misunderstandings, etc. Then there were the challenges of dealing with the university administration and student government, staying on top of our 7-figure budget, drafting reports to the student government, preparing audits, filling out paperwork (we were a non-profit student group), dealing with all the politics of the university student government (which was every bit as absurd as national politics), organizing our transport on tours, accomodations, meals, doing PR on location. Then there were the fans, the THOUSANDS of fans that would inundate us after each concert, learning how to deal with all that, learning how to deal with the dozens of invitations you receive for dinners, radio and TV interviews, dealing with the parents of fans who demand favors for their kids so they can get into your school and join your acapella group. Then there's the alumni networking, we have about 500 alumni over the past 40 years located all over the world that are involved in every professional field imaginable. They/we form a close-knit network that help our young members launch their careers. We provide guidance, funding, we've established a yearly scholarship open to any college student with good grades interesting in the arts, we offer internships in our individual professional fields, we do a lot of charity work and fundraising and we're such a tight knit group that we know all each other's wives, kids and families. We are best friends and worst enemies, we meet every week, we're there at each other's weddings, we're there when one of gets divorced, and yes, we're there when one of us dies. My membership in this acapella group has OPENED DOORS for my career and provided me with unimaginable advantages and opportunities too lengthy to list here. Suffice it to say, I wouldn't be here today were it not for my college acapella group, and I wouldn't have the social competences that I have now if it weren't for my college experiences in the arts and stage. My European college friends, in comparison, have neither access to these types of extracurricular activities nor the advantages of the networking they provide. And the difference is noticeable immediately. Whereas American college graduates tend to be socially well-rounded and able to easily navigate various social situations in addition to possessing a high degree of flexibility and adaptability (at least college grads from the late 90's), I've noticed this lacking among the European college graduates I've met. Whereas American college graduates already have years of professional experience in their chosen fields in addition to LEADERSHIP abilities, European college grads are having to start from scratch. There are some European universities that are now starting to experiment with forming partnerships with private companies, but these efforts are still in their early formative years. By the time I got my first job out of college, I'd already had years of leadership and organizational skills, and so was promoted to head my own department only after SIX MONTHS. This does not happen in Europe. Now granted, there are some very ambitious college students at European universities who, despite the lack of clubs and extracurricular activities at their universities, will actually seek out their own internships and get involved with private organizations in their communities, but this is the exception, not the rule. But these same students usually tend to be the ones who get very far ahead and who eventually get the best jobs. As to tuition fees, you're woefully mistaken as to how this works in the US. Yes, some universities charge absurdly high tuition fees (which then subsidizes the tuition fees for poorer students, so that they either study for free or pay a very low tuition), but you overlook the fact that a degree from these universities almost always guarantees a high paying job, which enables you to quickly repay these tuition loans. I paid off my student loans in just a few short years, and the same goes for most of my friends from college. As a matter of fact, since I live in Austria, I earn the lowest among my circle of college friends, many of whom easily earn 10+ my Austrian salary. When they visit me here in Vienna, I realize they have the type of lifestyle I could only dream of! The only people who are truly disadvantaged by high student loans and who end up in these documentaries on the subject that they LOVE to show on European TV are students who chose to study low-demand, low-paying majors like those in the languages and arts. As career opportunities in these areas are low, then of course you'll have a hard time repaying your student loans. But most students who choose a STEM subject or some other high demand major will most definitely be able to repay their student loans in no time.
I think it's analogous to comparing Linux to Microsoft or Apple: Linux is to Europe what Microsoft and Apple are to competitive US capitalism. But the UK is catching up where I only have to look at the ethnic makeup of the audience in Oxford university debates to see the university is far more globally competitive today compared to a few decades ago.
I don’t agree that European universities are lagging behind those from the US, and imo the reasoning you’re using in the video is the exact core of the problem: I’ve paid around €1.000 in total for my complete masters degree in my Western European country and I’m now making a decent middle class income. If I wanted to take on the same studies in the US, I can add a few zeros to that number. Given that we know that a less equal society = a worse society, I think we’re doing just fine in Europe.
I think you make a good argument for European universities being a better value given the cost but being a better value doesn’t necessarily mean better (or worse) quality
It is only at the same level if it is in UK. Everything else in Europe is only the best if you take it based on rankings. I know people who had masters in STEM in Switzerland and could not find work
@@PhilHug1 agree, although that depends on your definition on what the function of a university is. If it's to benefit society as a whole, I'm more likely to say that the European model is in fact better. If it's to give maximum chances to the top 1% of the top 1%, then indeed American Universities are doing a lot better. But for me personally, I'd rather have more people having a decent life than just a few lucky ones.
@@Parakeet-pk6dl a degree does not mean a better life for majority of the time. In fact, majority of the degrees especially those that are not in STEM leans more towards indoctrination rather than learning or employment.
Fundamentally they have the most money. It means they can buy the most advanced equipment but also buy there way into the best science journals and boost there metrics. It cost >£10,000 to publish your work in the best journals. So the richest will always do better
There is a lot valid criticism to the superiority of American universities. 1. In what areas can a university be superior? It seems to me only in STEM. And even then, only in certain areas. When we look at the nobel prizes recipients for physics and chemistry, we see that they used very expensive methods for their research. The vast majority of universities don't have those means and that is not necessary a bad thing. I think it is very valid for a country to decide that they are going to focus on their students to get the high education they need and if there are highly intelligent and driven students, they will get a scholarship to an American university. A pragmatic approach so to speak. 2. There are areas not so relevant for most countries like space enginering, marine biology, automotive enginering etc. very few countries have companies that are involved in those areas and/or don't need to excel in it. 3. The question should be whether a university is providing all the knowledge and skills needed to further the students ambitions and career. Student should not have the justified feeling that their education was insufficient. I don't think that is the case. 4. a university with 50 billion dollar in assets is batshit insane. 5. Looking at the number of published papers to determent the status of a university is flawed. What determents a good university is much more than just research.
Unlike what is stated in the video, the tenured professors in US universities are practically impossible to fire - that is what I've heard. Is it wrong?
That is true mostly for K-12. That's why the level below university in US is a joke. When you jump from grade school to universities, the level is so huge that if you are not prepared, you end up with F and D
@@manubhatt3 yes. Basically, from grade 1 to 12, these teachers belong to teachers union and they are extremely powerful. They donate big time to the democrat party. There was an instant where a pervert teacher gave students cookies with his sperms on them. He did not get fired and only got put into a room so he wouldn't be able to teach while still earning full salary.
@@manubhatt3 yes universities operate differently to k-12. For example, CTA is in public schools k-12 and community system. CSU and UC are not in it. The universities have more control and the levels of education are much higher. That's why my advice for younger kids is always to enjoy the time in high school and under but focus once in universities because it's more serious.
I expect to see this change going forward. Firstly Asian countries are catching up by investing in their own education programs Secondly the meritocracy that drove the best students to the best universities is being undermined by the DEI programs which while socially very relevant create another set of problems (from students who can’t cope to forcing the merit students to go elsewhere). Thirdly the US universities have now gotten bloated. Administration costs make up for a large chunk of the Student’s tuition fee. Many classes are taught by TAs as the professors are focused on Research. US Universities are now offering programs in areas that offer few real world opportunities.
Asian people have an excellent work ethic. The Asians that I went to school with went the extra mile and were rewarded for it. Yes - It's a cultural thing and the various Asian countries will and are being rewarded for this work ethic.
@@daniellarson3068 Asian parents also sacrifice and expect a lot from their kids. They will go the extra mile and expect that the kids understand that effort is what gets them ahead. I have seen universities progressively raise the bar for Asians and the Asians just put their heads down and work that much harder. They are polite and hard working.
*Choice of classes/Selecting a major later on* : those was a HUGE lures for me. At the end of high school, I managed to leave my native Europe and attend US universities. I put that freedom to good use, and pursued a complex interdisciplinary approach that has served me well in life. HOWEVER, back then, US universities - while hardly cheap - were not the astronomically-expensive ripoff that they have sadly become 😵💫
If you mean that you can go to the U.S. and get a useful degree and a high salary afterwards, then yea, that's what the data and my personal experience also say. But that's an odd way to phrase it...
What a cope. I can get an education online, but that won’t ensure me any type of job. It’s really all about credentials, american credentials are just better and more prestigious.
US student. This video is talking way too broadly. Yes we pay higher tuition, but our state governments are also cutting spending on education so that’s a given. Yes we have some of the worlds most elite universities, but we are also a huge country, huge. India and china are larger, yes, but they are also not developed countries, they don’t have the history or time to have created these institutions. Also, these elite institutions don’t actually take the best from the best, they are business as you said, so they take in what’s good for them financially. Rich wealthy donors are that market, so now you have a system in which legacies (students who are children of parents who attended the institutions in which they apply) have a 70x higher chance of getting in than the traditional population even all other aspect being equal. These elite institutions don’t take the best of the best, they only SOMETIMES take the best from the best. Also, applying to an Ivy is a essentialally luck, you could have perfect stats, a 1600 SAT, 36 on the ACT, perfect 5.0/4.0 gpa. 10+ extracurriculars, but you will always be passed on if your direct competitor is a legacy. Even if their stats are not comparable.
This !!! I have always dream of being in a US university but the tuition fee is too high. Also there is a really huge unjust to Asian student in the admission process. And genuinely this video treat US like a golden child. Personally I feel like this is a promotion video about how to broke your wallet on what you definitely don't need that much.
@ don’t let people lie to you, there is certainly some unjustness to Asian applicants but it’s not that extreme. Understand that universities in the United States care about merit to a certain point, once you “qualify” it’s more about wether you fit a certain role. It just kinda happens that certain groups fall into certain roles and it ends up causing an imbalance where certain groups then get marginalized as a result. Harvard does not want 2000 CS majors from the west coast that all have 4.0 GPAs and wanna focus on AI. It’s not unique in any sense and they don’t nor do they want to accommodate so many similar students. International applicants are sometimes treated more harshly but it’s also not your institution’s so it’s not really on the United State universities to accommodate you. As for financials, I would be on the look out as plenty of institutions do offer aid to international students, the bigger issue is getting accepted without being a full pay student.
There is another factor you didn't mention. I understand why it might be uncomfortable, but it's a very important factor: in WWII and the decade before it, Europe threatened and eventually killed off its Jewish population. Around the same time, US universities were repealing overtly antisemitic policies and accepting more Jews. It's not a coincidence that the three scientists mentioned in this video - Einstein, Bohr and Oppenheimer - were all Jewish. This is a nation that has disproportionally produced top scientists. Unfortunately for the US, this factor may be waning in the near future, as antisemitism has again reached fever pitch. It's likely that less antisemitic universities in the US, plus Israeli universities, are going to benefit the most.
You make an excellent point and one missed by the person who posted this video. The Nazis were anti-intellectual which vitiated German and Austrian intellectual life. Prior to the rise of Naziism, German universities were among the best in the world. Indeed, the philosophy of having higher education being research-led rather than teaching-led was orginally German. It was imported into the US in the late 19th century but didn’t really gain traction in the academy or wider society until the influx of academics - many of them Jewish - fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s.
You make a really good point about universities in Europe being constrained in hiring personnel by bureaucratic criteria usually coming from the government. You refer to scientific publications as a major metric. What you don’t mention is a recent criteria adopted in the last decade which further exacerbates this trend: DEI (diversity equality and inclusion). This means hiring a professor because they are black, not because they have produced anything of merit. The flip side of this of course means not hiring because a candidate is white regardless of anything they have produced (put simply, reverse discrimination). Of course the USA is not immune from this, indeed I think that US universities are even more prone to this tendency.
6:43 this video is very American. Only looking at 🤑$, growth, output, and economic viability. Dismissing the humanities at UNIVERSITIES is almost disgusting. "Adapt to the new professional reality"? Since when are universities supposed to teach what the majority of people need to know? 100yrs ago, most people were trade workers or farmers - does that mean universities ought to adapt? I am working at a university here in Austria, and although I have a business background, I appreciate the humanities a lot, actually even more than business studies, even though the latter is "more needed" economically.
A well-researched and thought-provoking analysis! All of the factors mentioned in the video are certainly spot on, but the biggest factor is certainly the enormous supply of money the top American universities receive. I mean if you give company A $50B to design a car and company B $1B to do the same, most probably A is going to produce a higher quality product. The relationship is not perfect, but when replicated multiple times, it tends to be true.
There might be inequality, but not in the traditional sense. Thanks to those large endowments and universities competing for the best students, poor but highly academically qualified students are often able to attend great universities at an extremely low price. From my own experience, there was almost a direct correlation between the ranking of the university and how much I was expected to pay. My parents made me apply to average-at-best local universities while I knew the best opportunity came from big national universities and it ended up that all of my elite picks I got into offered much better deals then the local universities and even slightly better than my still pretty highly ranked flagship in-state university.
Sorry but I disagree. Best university in the world are in Europe and then Asia. Especially in Asia as their average person tends to be more knowledgeable about the world in general. If by best you mean creating student debt and crippling entire generations then yeah, in that nobody can beat US.
Sorry to you . Cope dont work . Europe was better now its a joke . Admit it . That will be better then living in your own fantasy. This is coming from an asian .
I once attended a microchips programming training with my MIT and Stanford colleagues these people just read and write programs like spelling their own names.
So do people in top universities elswhere. Anywhere you get a high concentration of talent. I have a friend who can play chess in his head (i.e. not seeing the board, just hearing moves the other player makes, like pawn D2 to D3), and do it pretty well. He lives and breathes mathematics. I have a friend who just got into cryptography and is also an accomplished programmer... and has Linux on his _phone._. Double IT and Math major. PhD student who actually slept through most of his lectures in previous years and coasted top 10 in his major. Also 3D printed a working violin, because why not? Friend who sells their Blender 3D designs to people, nanoengineering student... Lab partner who has a basic lab in his own home. Can prattle off chemical info like a machine gun. _Boyfriend_ who has a basic lab in his own home. Then there's me, the failure lol. They've tried to poke at me and fix me lol, because I struggle so badly at university. Somehow we're still friends (and bf/gf).
It's because people value investing in the US and education is seen as an investment. Along with the tendency for Americans not liking to work for someone but instead be the boss of their own business. Also immigrants are highly driven individuals that fit perfectly in a competitive capitalist society and the US takes advantage of it. Most of the science graduates in the US are the children of fist generation immigrants and foreign students who often want to stay in the US. Compared to the Americans who are more than 2 generations American. Also the different policies and freedom every state has to drive their education system in which ever way their state benefits the most. Every state has different University systems and that adds to the competitiveness and specialized investments in certain departments of universities.
The US values investing in education? Not for half a decade, mate. You might have some of the best universities, but your level and quality of general education is atrocious.
You have to be open in every way to compete with the US. And that’s mainly alluding to cultural change, Europeans don’t want new people to come or the culture to change at all. US has been the opposite.
@@DivinesLegacy As a European I have to say this is simply not the case. But the liberal left loves to mix Asylum, immigration and basically recruitment together. The best people can get Visas in basically all countries if they work hard to further society. Now the mediocre people , of which I am part of, are welcome too generally but should be called into serious question with the advent of AI. And then there is Asylym, which makes absolutely no sense. Draining a population of its IQ people, and in doing so lowering the IQ of another population half way accross the planet, whilst importing previously localized cultural problems is insane
@@koushikdas1992 China is a unified state of 1.4 billion people. For now they don’t need more immigrants. They have so many people that they don’t need to rely on the world so much. Europe has a declining population and is divided.
Coming from a student in the EU (ULB - Belgium), I'd say it's pretty good the system. I am privileged because my faculty is small (polytechnique), so my perspective may be different. From my point of view, the only limit we have is money. If European universities became research centers that are run like companies, they would raise tons of money and also make countless publications. I am an undergrad, and for my case our means and resources are enough for teaching as the primary activity (Idk much about research). I have never been in a study hall of more than 200 students and 50% of the classes are given in small 25-30 student groups. In all my time, I never had an email go unanswered for more than 24 hours by a TA. While the inbreeding thing exists, we also know the inbreds and they have a reputation: they were the best of the best in two or four consecutive promotions, probably had offers across the Atlantic but I think Belgians don't like leaving their cute small country. One I had the privilege to learn from was this guy who basically did a full maths bachelor in parallel with his engineering studies. He runs circles around pure mathematicians and physicists alike but maybe funding isn't easy to get for his research (as is the case for many). We do fun projects and sometimes with our own money we do crazy things and its a lot of fun. I know however that once you want to do scientific research the money thing hits you like a 500 ton hammer. I heard mates talking horror stories where one student in like 10 or 15 elite kids was taken for a PhD program, that is 14 good researchers that were lost and this probably happens a lot. So, the fun for everyone will last until the day we get our engineering diplomas, then those who go into industry will be happy (very) and aspiring researchers (the cum laudes and above) will either smile or cry a lot. It's true that US schools beat EU schools on research, but that will be solvable once there is more money invested in. A few miles from my city, we have KULeuven in Leuven and it is a perfect example of what a European school becomes once annointed with tons of money.
Idk what you study at ULB but some of my friends study there and they tell me that, at least in the first year, you'll have way more students than what the classroom can hold. One of them said they were 1000 students for a classroom of 300, maybe 350. Yes, some students don't attend but still they had students in the hallway looking through the door to follow the lecture.
@@tiagozadra4307 I study engineering at ULB. Your friends probably study psychology or one of those other popular majors. I have a friend in computer science and there, they are like 600-800 in the first semester of the first year. It never happens for us in engineering. Maybe it's because we have admissions exams that weed people out while in other faculties (except medicine as well), everyone with a highschool diploma has a RIGHT to admission (you don't even need good grades in highschool, it is your government-given right). The most important thing is that we have the means to have all the fun possible. We have means to do all sorts of projects (and we do lots of them in labs and some in garages) and our instructors are always there for us anytime anywhere ESPECIALLY in the first 2 years where things are can be a bit harder for the average student who is admitted.
@@tiagozadra4307 The difference is that medical admission exams are corrected by the government while engineering ones are corrected by individual faculty committees at universities and recently, a quota for medical school admissions was officially established. I wouldn't judge other courses' quality because I never followed any of them.
There are indeed quite a few US universities in the top 20. However, if you look at the top 100 Universities in the world, the number of US universities that are on that list is actually quite low compared to how many people live in the US. They only serve a tiny percentage of the total university population. As a matter of fact, looking at the big picture, the quality of the education that the average American can enjoy sn't particularly high, especially if you compare it to how how much these universities cost. If you look at counties like Australia, the Netherlands, Korea , or Zwitserland, for example, they do much, much better.
"especially if you compare it to how how much these universities cost." -- You might as well say fashion is important to education quality. IMO, what this gentleman gets wrong is the general importance of university education. Universities are lumbering dinosaurs, imo. The Internet is making education almost free -- for those who seriously want it.
Everybody knows the US has the world's best colleges and universities, but that was long back, US colleges and universities these days are not of US anymore, even though it's in the United States, but are controlled by either china or Muslim immigrants, most Muslim immigrants, if these immigrants wants then they can even make entire US college's and universities bleed like they did by protesting in support of Hamas recently. So funny thing is, these colleges and universities are on US soil only but pretty much own by Muslim immigrants.
Having taught in both American and European universities in STEM, here are my observations: 1) The lack of "community colleges" for those students who wish to continue their studies after secondary but don't need a university degree. 2) The lack in cooperation with businesses in the area - in the US my CS department had an advisory counsel made up of local industries who hired our students. The idea of getting advice from "outside" the university was frowned upon in Europe. 3) Alumni engagement was non-existent. A student graduated and perhaps came back 50 years later just before they died to see how things had changed. Of course, the lack of big-time college athletics might be a major contributor. 4) The idea that a professor could not show up to class except sporadically and not get fired was eye-opening to me. 5) That we had professors of CS who were still teaching what was taught 50 years ago and would not change.
Before we can comment on why the US has the best Unis, we should analyze whether the ranking criterias are accurate reflections of how students do well. Is it salary? Not always since Harvard students would go to Wall street or big tech. Is it research? Not really, the research of the few do not represents the mass. I have worked with people who used to go to Havard or MIT and I would not say these are the smartest people that I have worked with. If you are multimillionaires and you can easilily spend hundreds of thousands for your kids' education then fair enough but otherwise not often be good investment.
I don’t mind that top private universities raise money for funding the way that they do however I feel that the singular most damaging thing that has happened in the last forty years was the percentage of public funding that was cut to state universities and local colleges that was provided by the federal government. Nothing has escalated the price of college education for middle and lower middle class students and thei parents more leaving students with tremendous student loan debt.
Don't forget an important aspect of the rise of American excellence in education: all the Jewish professors, teachers, researchers and doctors who fled Europe in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism.
Haven't Cambridge University and Oxford University beaten US Universities few times under the World University Rankings (World Reputable Ones)? Though yes, US Universities still are the World's Best during Most Times
yes. also, German universities are wildly underrated by the uni ranking system. for example, German universities for Physics work alongside the Planck institute, which has Nobel prize winnings Physicists teaching the German Physics students in their courses, and much of the funding comes from these institutions too. This doesn't get accounted for in the uni ranking system, since it's considered an external organisation, even though it is an integral part of the German university teaching system. (My knowledge is limited, so I can only give what I know. ngl, some of the German unis are better in Physics than Oxford is imo)
The US may have the "Top of Top" Universities, but beside them and some more "elite" ones, probably more than half of them are at best "average". Fees are way too high and that leaves a lot of people into student debt. And if you don't study in one of those more upper level universities, you are not getting your moneys worth. The result is that a big percentage of the people in the US have only high school diploma or some useless college degree. A lot of people are below the middle class. Yes the US is the richest country but the wealth is very concentrated. I lot of people struggle. Europe on the other hand may not have the best of the best, but has a lot of good universities where you can get a very good education and have a good career. Going does not cost an arm and a leg. The result is that way more of the population have a good level of education which leads to a better quality of life and over all environment. I agree that the system needs to change in Europe to stimulate the best of the best and gifted kids in order to stay here and push the economy forward but we should also strive to provide affordable education to the majority of the people.
And what are the results? They are beating us everywhere! The quality is greater than ours and the system encourages thinking and how to use everything available to you.
The downside of making university Affordable for everyone and professors immovable from their jobs is that the quality of the students and their research is likely to be mediocre, hence the best and those who move society forward will choose to study or teach elsewhere. So there are trade-offs to every scenario.
You overlook the influence of language. It is a commonplace now that English has become the lingua franca of the world, despite not being the most-spoken! This advantages students taught in English and the most populous country where English us the primary language? Yeah, you saw that coming, didn't you? Apparently, it is becoming common for universities in not-English-speaking countries to offer degree programs in which the language of instruction is English! I assure you: If there's a way to get an American degree in an American university while not being firced by necessity to learn English, it's a VERY well-hidden secret. I am also aware that as goes instruction goes too the advantage of knowing and learning in English, as an ever-increasing proportion of academic output (peer-reviewed journals in particular) are written in English. Much as Latin and Greek were once the keys to unlocking setious scholarship, English has become history's third great contender. (The fourth will be whatever native language AI's will develop amongst themselves when they are allowed to communicate freely.) Money, specialization, flexibility, location in a country that not only reveres free enterprise, but struggles to apply it in the least fertile areas, coupled with a belief in its own exceptionalism (confidence breeds success because a lack of confidence produces not failure, but stagnation) and, well, English, and it would be utterly inexplicable if America did not excel in producing extraordinary universities.
About 30% of students who get into Harvard are relatives of donors or legacies. Legacies are C- students whose rich daddies or mommies went to Harvard. So no, it's not true to say "only the best go to Harvard".
I think this is a bit superficial. It’s not true that it’s easier to fire professors in the US than Europe. In the US, once a professor is tenured, they cannot be easily fired. Another thing is that the rankings favor universities that use English, which means that they get higher citations. I think the wealth of the US is a major reason for success be because you need money to buy equipment for research. It’s important to mention that the best publications in STEM fields are now coming from China and this is due to the fact that there more money available to but expensive equipment for research. China is now luring researchers around the world with good salaries and advanced research equipment.
Some details made no sense to me -- e.g. "easy to fire bad professors" - Tenure, anyone? Also, how is publication pressure different in the EU than in the U.S.? That isn't clear to me either.
Enrolment is falling at most of them, a number are projected to go bust in coming years. Proof that young Americans don't need university to be smart, they are realizing by themselves that the debt isn't worth it.
US university model of focusing on liberal arts like having general education subjects that are burdensome for someone who is too dependent on student loans, so it cannot be replicated in other countries where college students have to work at the same time to pay tuition fees. The Philippines copies the US university model and look the quality of Filipino college graduates from the Philippines - they are academically abysmal.
To pay for universities in USA is almost impossible, the education sistem does not work pretty well. Most of the people get big debts for that, they pay for it during years and years, stopping them to study more or growing economically.
Why would you use the Shanghai ranking, here, to the exclusion of the QS or THE rankings? What about the high-ranking and well-respected UK HE institutions with strong reputations for research, as well as those in the US? In general, beyond its click bait title, I feel this video gives a skewed, misleading picture of the topic at best. Most of it bears little relation to the reality in the UK, for instance. Whilst some of your 'facts' are questionable, others are unmitigated crap! Have you actually done any research before making this video?
There's no need to argue; just look at the universities chosen by winners of the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). MIT and Harvard are among the most attractive choices. Similarly, consider Nobel Prize winners.
I'm north american and I'm gonna disagree. The universities you listed at the start are the "most prestigious" but that's not the same as best at educating students. I know plenty of people that graduated from MIT and Harvard, and their experience says the opposite. You're probably never going to see your professor during their office hours and good look finding them. Even graduate students report the same issue. The university system in the USA is horribly broken. Stop pushing the lie that US universities are the best, they aren't. The reason the US managed to stay ahead of other countries is mostly due to steady influx of immigrants. The tech industry owes the innovation to first and second generation immigrants. Regular tenure professors aren't that high. The publish or perish model is horribly broken and generally bad for society and education. Firing a tenure professor is real hard and basically not worth the hassle. Lots of tenure professors don't care about teaching and only want to work on research.
The US has some of the best unis in the world but Europe has an equal number if not a larger number of great universities. If you look at the top end (the top 10) the UK alone has atleast 2 in there (oxford and cambridge) while 2 more have also been placed there over the last few years (Imperial College London almost always secures a lower position in the top 10 and University College London has made it to number 10 once) Besides those there are many specialist unis in London that are better than most american unis that do those subjects (Such as the London Business school which is ranked 2nd or 3rd in the world depending on who you ask or the London School of Economics and Political Sciences which is ranked in the top 10 for economics and politics) That's just the UK. There are many great unis on the level of the ones I mentioned above in all of the european majors (TU Munich, PSL, Sorbonne, etc) So Europe definitely does compete with america in number of top unis.
@@rolfw2336 The US and UK both hit above their weight in terms of number of good unis in the top 100 (combined they make up something like 70% of the top 100 but they're only 5% of the worlds population) UK universities are definitely being pushed down though. (except for thing like oxford and cambridge which will realisitcally not be out of the top 10 even in 100 years due to their outstanding reputation which attracts the best talents from across the world. Same could be said for imperial I guess but the rest are suffering.)
The mojarity of riches people they have little formal school yet are better than those who have degrees in the universities, it seem universities are obsolete. But am not encouraging you leave, remember don't confuse your school with your education.
I had an Argentine guy arguing with me that University in Argentina was better than the US, because all students from Latin America go there for school.
I have the feeling that in the US, you either go to a top university or you go to a not so great university. In Europe, or at least in Germany, I’ve not seen too many bad universities. There are some good ones. Nothing like Harvard or Stanford, but good ones like TU Munich, Heidelberg, KIT, Aachen, Mannheim, Berlin etc. I’ve not met a single colleague from a bad university in Germany.
that's not true, there are tons of good but not great universities that non-Americans won't know because they don't get attention in internatonal news just like those good but not famous universities in Germany, there are also terrible schools
Those are not good universities, they are I'll stamp on the less advantaged in society type of Universities, I find the way you present such bad society as the epitome of success quite ironic and frankly prviliged and offensive.
Yep, totally agree. Two things that ruin a society and Visual Economic stands by as no other: neo libertarianism and migration from countries with incompatible moral sets to the west 🙃
I do belief EU universities can improve quality without sacrificing much equality. Including better pay for teachers in general, the ability to fire bad performing teachers and ranking performance (and bonus) on student performance after 5 years of graduation and student satisfaction. Rather than just the number of graduated students.
This video reminds me of something I read in a Sci-Fi novel, whose title, author and even plot are not recalled. However, there was something I read that has stuck with me. And of course I am paraphrasing, not quoting. All Men are NOT created equal. The potential varies dramatically from individual to individual. The most successful Society is the one that provides Equal Opportunity for as much of its members as possible to reach their own individual maximum potential.
I'm in the US, and as far as academic rigor, I think the US falls far behind Europe. The level of grade inflation we see in the US is significantly higher than US universities. There is also a lot of variation among US universities. There are elite universities like Harvard that only accept the best of the best, but there are also state schools that accept almost anyone who applies. While I do believe that university fees are way too high in the US, I guess it's good that we at least get something in return for those high fees here.
Total BS. I had friends who studied in Italy and Sweden. They would say they get 95-100 on projects for doing nothing . That same paper wouldn’t get more than 75 in the US.
A huge factor of how universities are ranked is by how many foreign students come there and how much research it produces - I'm not sure how important this is for your average student. The majority of people who get a degree are NOT going to stay in the academia. So it begs the question for the average student - is it more important that they can afford to actually get in, learn enough so that they qualify for a good paying job while at the same time not cracking under enormous peer pressure or is it more important that if they get a PhD at that university that they are likely to get the best equipment, grants, etc. But what was mentioned in the video stands - there is a huge burden with "too many" students per number of staff as well as the industry usually paying a lot more than academia which leads many to eventually make the switch.
The first 100 people to use code ECONOMIKEN with the link will get 60% off of Incogni: incogni.com/economiken
And only India and China be a student there😂
You should mention also the student debt problem, it's becoming harder and harder for the ridiculously expensive education to pay off in the US.
Student debt is an issue but you have to also examine which field of study those students are getting degrees in. Eventually one has to determine the cost benefits of the degree they pursue. I am not excusing the leading parties that prey on potential students but to spend $200K on a degree that leads to a job that doesn’t pay is not a wise decision .
When I graduated, by debt was about 3-5X my annual salary. But I got my degree in a field that paid well, so it was paid off quickly. Best investment I ever made; I'd do it the same way if I had to do it again.
Aside from getting a useful degree, my other secret: Keep living like a poor student for awhile after you graduate and start working. Tempting to get that new car, buy a house, etc... but don't do it. Get that debt and its interest paid off and start splurging after.
Only if you do a useless major
poor people don't have to pay for university in the usa if they are smart enough to shop around for the school that will give them a scholarship. but there are also universities were any student who gets accepted doesn't pay if their family income is below a certain level (like $60k a year).
Wrong on this. The US student debt problem was caused by stupid students taking on stupid degrees that would not offer the kind of wages allowing them to pay back. When there are so many students in women studies, arts, chicano studies, etc.... these are not practical. If you would ask students in the STEM field, they have absolutely no problem with debt at all. Do you think the top students mentioned in this video have debt problem? Not likely. Do you know why? Because they usually get full scholarships for being talented and their contributions to the researches
I have had the pleasure of studying in both Europe and the USA. One difference is that in the US you are exposed to practical cases and learn to solve problems. Europe is pure theory.
Yeah, Practice and learn how to apply skills to real world scenarios are actually what matters.
There's a funny joke that goes "American engineer or economist or whatever goes to a symposium in Europe to present his latest breakthrough in his field. The Europeans listen politely as he rattles off experimental result after experimental result that changes EVERYTHING. When he's done, one of the Europeans says 'That's all well and good, but how does it work in theory?'"
Did Edison need to know Maxwell's Laws? Indeed, DID he? Ford thermodynamics? You never hear the word much any more, but Americans were once distinguished as being a particularly ingenious lot, much as Germans were exceptionally industrious (they remain so). Though not said (it sounds SO 19th Century, early 20th), it remains characteristic of American business and entrepreneurs.
One problem that wasn't mentionned here is that culturally, almost every "normal" student is expected to register in a univercity at 17-18 (i live in Belgium). You will very rarely see people who tried a few years "to work in the real world" only to come back to university. It just doesn't happen (almost never)
So basically even if we have no idea what to do we still have to follow the fixed curriculum to get the degree. That + the cheapness of studies makes a LOT of drop offs.
Also yeah 80-90% of teachers at an engineering school comes from the "frat" of that school (not a US frat, more responsable but still). That's just how it is. If you don't you're an outsider
You will soon be an outsider in your own country (Belgium), better pack up
Yeah, the mature students admission is an excellent thing.
Interesting.. for someone that doesn't know what they want to "be", taking a year off (or two) before colleage would be nice, right?
I am a Canadian researcher who did his undergraduate and master's in Canada and now doing PhD in Europe. I consider to have experienced both cultures. In my view, it's true in general that Europe is seriously lagging behind but the video contains a lot of cliches on european culture they just projected on european academic culture and missed some key weaknesses. For starters, it's not true lazy european academics can simply get a job here by asking the right person. There are no handouts here. Also, salaries is not really a factor in motivating academics. Why would we sacrifice 10+ years of our prime working years living in the poverty line working 60 hours per week doing PhDs and post-docs if in the end we were interested in making the highest salary? Finding any position is extremely difficult so we really don't have the luxury in picking the university offering the highest salary. Believe me I wish that were the case. Most people just take whatever job they are lucky enough to find same as in the US. There's also a problem in definitions. Europe gives more weight to research institutes than universities for the research aspect of academia. The German Max Planck Society and French CNRS are both in Nature's 2023 top 5 research institutes (above stanford) but are not technically universities so don't show up in any university rankings. Other institutes such as the CEA, Pasteur or Francis Crick Institute are incredible but highly specialized so don't show up in many rankings either. I think the biggest weakness is language and funding. US spends 3.5% of GDP in R&D while the EU spends 2.3% with of course some huge regional disparities as northern Europe forming the bulk of R&D spending. The US also has a vast military-industrial complex that invests lots of money in research. Save for France, no EU country really has this type of partnership and it's in only a very limited extent. American universities have a huge advantage in that they get a lot of foreign undergraduate students paying bank to study there in english, the world's lingua franca. Some truly outstanding european universities like KUL, TUM or USaclay will never have this source of revenue since classes aren't taught in english unfortunately.
Ok but you know you are canadian . So you dont know anything about usa . Just bc u live beside usa doesn't mean usa is same as canada . I hope you understand what i m trying to say here .
Also there's a lot of back and forth of academics between the two in their careers. Quite normal to move to and from the states two or three times
They said USA, not Canada… similar culture but the USA is the big brother tho
The total student debtload of the U.S. is 1.77 trillion. This is a drag on the young (and even older) people who cannot buy homes, have children, or start a future. This is all because of the massive amount of tuitions these universities charge. the U.S. Might have the "best" universities, but there are tradeoffs
Depends on what those students earn.
And what programs they use, if it is a useless one than no wonder they can't pay it off@@timo3724
@@timo3724 Very few will earn much above the average.
The reason Australia, Canada and Ireland are also in top 100 universities, above Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, China, etc. is because of English. If they didn't have ENglish they wouldn't be that popular.
The US system burn bright, but fast. It will crash.
This is true but salaries are significantly higher in the USA and taxes are significantly lower.
Student debt is problem mostly for peolple who studied at "shitstudies". Now income share agreement are better alternative that student debt - no ban will give money for "shitstudies".
There is a big part where the best universities are the best is because they are ranked as the best. They get the best students because they have the most applicants. They get the best professors because they are the most desirable. They get the largest donations because the best universities There students go on to do great things because they are from the best universities. There is little in the system that actually measures whether these universities actually do good job at teaching students. I would expect that this trend will continue as AI will allow actually education of students to be done without universities, so the value of going to a mediocre or poor university continues to fall.
Not ai but online video lectures and textbook access. One big problem is Griggs v. Duke Power.
@@georgerogers1166 It seems like Griggs v. Duke Power is one of the key factors behind the rise of the current credentialism. So, I'd argue it drives the down the value of going to a poor or mediocre university even further in an era of video lectures, good text books, and AI lead training like Brilliant. But, I guess if SCOTUS can come up with Griggs v. Duke Power, there is at least a possibility that SCOTUS could come up with a decision that invalidated making decisions based on what college you went to. Mess things up a lot, forcing colleges to actually qualify their graduates?
Would they be considered good at teaching if their students do the best?
The Superbrand unis it's called
Title should be: Why the US has the world's most expensive universities.
There is no such thing a "better" university. 1+1 is always equal to 2, and wether you learn that at MIT or in the most remote backwater countryside of Siberia makes no difference. The knowledge you acquire will always be the same, wether you spend $80,000 per year on tuition or not.
The only things that do change are campus benefits (universities may offer more comfortable accomodation, better food at the cafeteria, more sport clubs, class trip options...) and prestige, as well as connections for future careers.
But in no way do the "best" universities in the world offer more knowledge to the degree you are pursuing. Sometimes they even teach you less! I know that because I study astrophysics, and the astrophysics taught at Harvard that I saw online is Kindergarden knowledge compared to what we study in our classes in Germany where we pay less than $300 yearly tuition. No, not $300k, only 300 quid.
If you think you will become some brilliant brain by joining these elite universities, think again. Yeah you will get connections to the elite of society and it will help you a lot in climbing the social ladder to make your access to wealth much easier, no doubt, but you will not be any smarter than others who studied the same things as you at any other university.
Then why are they ahead of us in actually making stuff that move the world forward?
This couldnt stray further from reality. The qwuality of education varies drastically throughout the system. You seem to be under the impression that all degrees follow comply with some kind of universal curriculum or syllabus. In reality every professor, school, and degree are unique. Any of the Ivy league schools, MIT, Stanford etc. Have historically produced exponentially more brilliant people/research than your average community and state university, and will continue to do so.
Yea, this is just wrong.
I got a Computer Science degree at SWT (now Texas State) in 1996 and interviewed in Austin. During two interviews, I was told that they love SWT students because our CS program was so practical, and that U.T. Austin students are only good at writing proofs, calculating Big-Oh, and drawing flowcharts. There is a HUGE difference between schools -- and those two are less than 50 miles from each other in a state as big as ours!
If all you are doing at MIT is learning kindergarten arithmetic, you are throwing a lot of money away for no good reason. You say you study astrophysics, so I can just sort of see why you might think that ("one university is as good as another regardless of money") in a mostly theoretical field. But a school that can spend $100s millions on lab equipment, computers, and attracting the best professors is going to have different opportunities and outcomes than one that can barely scrape together $10 million, especially in cutting edge fields.
Look at the student outcome and research outcome in US universities
I graduated from a bottom tier state university. I could google every answer to my online classes and most of the in person courses gave everyone an a for whatever reason
Tell me about it. American educational system is a flop....just branding men
... you make me want to do that lol... meanwhile I've been grinding for years at a degree that is soul crushingly difficult, to the extent everything else in my life I have done so far is just not as hard (I'll take work! Work is easier!).
And for what? I have no idea. Crossing my fingers this year will have less crying in the bathroom than last year.
6:24 Hi, I am from Germany. This happened during my high school ("Oberstufe") years: Our biology teacher was making dangerous claims about masks that weren't true and just wasting the whole lesson (90 mins) ranting about having to wear a mask. I wish I was joking but I am not. And not just one lesson. Every lesson. This was especially a problem because a lot of us students needed those lessons to prepare for our finals! He did make some more strange comments about other topics but mostly him wasting our study time was the problem. I reported him and he only got suspended for a day. A day. Bruh, it did nothing. I was so pissed. I am glad I am in university now and can more or less choose my teachers. Thank goodness!
Why are you mentioning your high school story? This conversation is solely about universities and why the US ones are supposedly better than the alternatives. German universities are top-notch, and are very cheap for any student, regardless of whether they’re domestic or international. The reason they don’t appear as high as contenders like Oxbridge, Ivy League and so on is because of language of instruction and separation pf purely research based institutions and purely teaching institutions. Research output is a major component of university rankings, and German universities usually do a lot more teaching than research, as they have Institutes for such duties.
Any why is this relevant? You just needed to "rant" I take it?
"6 - Thema verfehlt" I'd say...
@@DragosRoute66sadly, this happens in university too. At least in Spain.
Problems also come in how they rank universities. American universities are tailored towards research and development the students are just the income stream to facilitate this and keeping the centre of the crop in there post graduateprograms. Where European universities are more dependent on student outcomes, getting there best students into private sector allowing wider networking for the postgraduates.
the US has hundreds of colleges that have no real research being done by the faculty, they are oriented toward teaching. many have been around over 200 years, so this isn't new. i went to one for undergrad before going to a research university for a phd.
Disagreed. If the students are just income stream for US and student outcomes are for EU, shouldn't EU perform better? The number indicated otherwise. Don't you know how much US universities and private sectors interwine? Where do you think the US unversities get their money from? Private sector actively recruits, invests, and works with US universities. Another fact is if the US universities are not shackled with the political correctness BS and affirmation action with student admission, the level of talents would be even higher.
If we are talking about Ivy League, then yes, bigger public schools (UF, UT, USC) is a yes as well, but 90% of colleges are far to small with out the kind of budget or students that you are alluding to.
US universities GOT FREEDOMM 🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅
@fewkeyfewkey5414 so does 99% of the world's university so what's you're point?
According the Shanghai index Sweden is remarkable high ranked, twice as high as US with half of the resources. Would be interesting to hear your opinion why this is the case.
Choosing which courses one wants to study is a good facility of US universities.
It's so much easier to follow and focus without music
Uk have loads that are great. Cambridge, Oxford, KCL, imperial, UCL, LSE, UOB, Queen Mary's, and UOM. In fact, cambridge, oxford, ucl and Imperial are all in the top 10 in the world, quite an achievement given how much larger usa is and how many hundreds of millions of more people it has.
Not what they used to be.
Only oxford and cambridge . Others are not. Look at any rankings .
Yeah they mentioned that the UK is an exception. Their approach is very similar to the US just on a smaller scale
@@ovibiswas7849 ucl and imperial are amazing
@ovibiswas7849 Edinburgh is top 20
I happen to study at a state-owned economics and business school in Europe. There was one professor who let only one student pass out of 300 students who took an exam in the course of FInancial accounting. They can do this because they are employed by the state and often enjoy a culture of impunity. Universities are state-owned and in that sense affordable to most people. That doesn't change the fact that they are a state enterprise, so it common for our bathrooms to not have toilet paper due to the bureaucratic procedure of public procurement.
The fact is that many of such state-owned universities are well-accredited because of their tradition of contributing to academia. The same goes for private universities in the United States: they have their tradition.
i'l call it bullshit. I study at a public university in Portugal (one of the countries with the strictest worker policies in all of Europe) and having already studied at an economics college, and currently at an engineering college, any professor who is caught doing something like that, in addition to being fired, is expelled from the order of researchers, probably for life, due to lack of academic conduct.
Strict employability policies, as typically happens in public servants, are not a shield, you cannot do what you want without expecting consequences. I smell that you are simply a random American wanting to spread the "fear" of the left. And this is coming from someone who hates the current system
@@afonsoabreu5144 He is talking about Germany, and implicitly glorifying everything socialist (unterminable, unaccountable Professors) justified with the argument that *everyone can afford it* , which also means absence of standardised merit based admission process. Any wonder German corporate world is near 100% homogeneous, far more than UK, USA, even Switzerland and Netherlands.
Because everything is subjective, and there are zilch transparence or accountability.
@afonsoabreu5144 well in Italy similar things happen. Professors do whatever they want, I had multiple exams with 90% of the class rejected, and they have nearly zero accountability.
@@marcoac-sx6lq The same thing happens in Portugal. But taking difficult exams and letting someone you want through just because you like them are very different things.
But in some Portuguese colleges you have some type of protection in this regard. Last year there was a subject with around an 80% failure rate so the students made a joint complaint to the university council and these teachers were removed from the department of that subject. They were not fired, just relocated to another area of the college
Having worked in both European and American universities, this video got a lot of things wrong.
For one, most of the problems he mentioned European universities have so do American ones. Most professors in America don't have incentives to teach well since their contracts depend on how many papers they publish. Not the quality of their teaching or how impactful their research is. Mainly the quantity. Hence the 'publish or perish' mentality. And why it's common for students to complain about mediocre professors. But because of tenure, universities cannot fire incompetent teachers. The rise in adjuncts has changed this somewhat but the trade-off has been decreasing the pay and benefits, making such positions less desirable.
University inbreeding is also widespread in the Ivy League and state schools. It's just somewhat spread out, you'll see mainly Ivy League graduates in the Ivy Leagues and major state school or Ivy League graduates in state schools. Applicants usually get these positions through contacts (their supervisors know someone who owes them a favor) or how many papers they published (not how good they are). Everyone else typically gets the scrap positions (adjunct).
What does differentiate American universities from European ones is the competitiveness they create (most of which is artificial), more independence on how to carry out business, and how rich they are. The latter definitely makes a huge difference which is noticeable when comparing a European university to an average American one (European usually provides better quality of education). Lots of money allows them to create the best labs possible. Patents and startups come out of such labs which brings in even more money. That along with the oversaturation of PhDs in the market (which universities are well aware of but keep promoting), drives wages down and increases competitiveness.
Many professors in the public universities just don’t teach or teach terribly. Some of the graduate students as teachers teach the undergraduates, which is unfair for the latter to pay so much for this kind of service, though some graduates do teach better than the professors 😂. Some disciplines definitely need the professors and researchers to research, but many just don’t need the endlessly produced trash papers. To sum up, if the American universities and its whole education system is not adjusting in the students’ favor, they are gonna dwindle. Online education will step in further.
europen universities offer horbl quality of research
there is a reason europ sucs at innovation
@@Tony-lj5lr based on my experience, the quality of research is about the same as the average American university. Of course, research at universities like MIT and Stanford tends to be of much greater quality but mainly due to how much money they can spend on research. Otherwise, average American universities are quite comparable to European ones.
europ started 2 worldwars and slautrd more than 50 million people
the continent with the most disgusng histry in the world by far is europ@@macroxela
@@Tony-lj5lr include research institutes in the equation and the scenario changes quite a bit. CNRS, the max Planck society etc
Great commentary, Josh! Admittedly, one drawback of the US system is the cost.. these top schools have yearly tuitions that can exceed $50k.. of course there can be aid and loans but it's still a crazy amount for the non-affluent.
Although the video mentioned a negative influence in performance from government oversight, simply implying that greater autonomy of universities drive quality is an oversimplification and misses the fundamental role of governance structures: a highly autonomous university under control from its own staff tends to become complacent and vulnerable to capture by their interest to maintain status quo and least effort and risk,, whereas more successful universities tend to be under the control of associations of former students whose interests are aligned with maximizing the results and reputation of their alma mater. This would have been an important dimension of analysis in such comparisons.
What would you say about Harvard refusing to buckle to political pressure to fire its President, Gay over antisemitism/free speech?
Too poor to afford a degree, and not smart enough for a scholarship is where I sit. Thankfully trade schools have really picked recently so I have that going for me.
While true, something like engineering requires a degree from an accredited university.
Which is nice 🤣
But the question is for how long will this be the case?
For a long long time! The US gov. sees their universities as places of innovation! Especially today when America is on the bring of a Cold war, which according to many has already started, they would boost their investments into education
Ironic he keeps mentioning Harvard over and over again, given what they've been in the news for over the last couple of months. Give the Marxists more time to run things, and they'll make US universities just as bad as the European ones.
As the long as the corporate world stands. They will continue to fund the education system. Its just a cog in a wheel.
I'm an American expat currently living in Vienna, Austria. I did my undergraduate in NY and my graduate degree here in Austria, so I got to see first hand the differences between both systems. In my opinion, a good 70% of the shortcomings at European universities can be explained by a lack of finances. Another reason is the dogged belief that universities should be free and open to anyone who WANTS to attend, as opposed to those who DESERVE to attend. Here in Austria, as in the rest of Europe, universities are FREE and most times there are no tests required for admission. You might have to pay some sort of registration or administrative fee, but that's never more than $500 a semester. Compare that to the $10,000 a semester (after financial aid) I paid while studying in NY! But as they say, you get what you pay for. In NY we had 24 hour libraries, 2 or 3 olympic sized swimming pools located in two VAST, professional sport centers with every type of equipment imaginable, we had huge stadiums for track and field and football, we had our own TV and radio stations (yes, that's the plural!), our own post office with our own zip code, our own 24 hour bus system, our own police force, pubs, bars, restaurants, first class musical and opera performances in a 2000+ seat theater in addition to smaller theaters for chamber music, etc. ,we had dozens of sport offerings (everything from horse riding to rock climbing), then there were the sold out concerts from visiting rock & pop stars, the dozens upon dozens of independently run student organizations, the independently run student government, the independently run student newspapers, the tremendous Greek life, the acapella groups, the symphony orchestras, the choruses, the jazz and ballet and modern and improvisational dance troupes, and the list goes on and on.
NONE OF THIS exists in European universities. And even where they do have some sort of clubs or extracurricular activities, they tend to be very minor affairs completely dependent on the discretion of the university administration. In Europe you simply go to university to attend classes, and then you go home. Student housing here is either non-existent or it's a joke, so most students have to find their own housing on the private market. Not only are universities here extremely underfunded, but they're also extremely crowded - the University of Vienna alone has over 90,000+ students, with lecture halls overflowing onto the streets. Being hired here as a professor has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with politics. Your tenure exists entirely at the pleasure of the ruling political party, and once you get hired, you're pretty much allowed to do whatever you want as the title of "Professor" comes with a plethora of privileges and carries a LEGAL distinction. Professors here both expect and are given the most obsequious deference and they act every bit the royal prince. They must not be contradicted and they must not be offended. Whatever they say, you do, and they must be addressed with the title of "Herr Professor" (Sir Professor) or "Frau Professor" (Madam Professor) at ALL TIMES, even in private and even outside the university environment. I used to proofread Master and PhD theses for graduate students and about 2/3 of the times their work contained faulty or factually wrong statements. Whenever I made corrections or confronted them about this, they explained that they were instructed by their professor to stick to the course book WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. Any deviation from his written material meant an automatic fail.
On account of the chronic underfunding and massive amounts of students who more or less each have a RIGHT to attend university (because of the weird laws here guaranteeing "equality"), professors have NO TIME to devote their individual attention to their students. There are no such things here as TA's and graduate students are not required to teach, as they are in the US. So it's not unusual for a single professor to have to supervise 300 or 600 students, especially in the more popular majors. And even if the government tries to force students to pay a small nominal fee to provide universities with some desperately needed financing, students take to the streets and riot. I know a guy who hired a mutual friend of ours to write his Master's thesis. It was so sloppily and half-heartedly written that I was sure it would be rejected. His supervising professor barely spent 5 minutes flipping through the pages and before I knew it, I was attending his pompous graduation ceremony. This could have never happened in the US as graduate students have to defend their thesis in front of an academic jury, answering their unscripted questions to their satisfaction. But because professors here are so overworked and understaffed, they simply lack the time to provide detailed scrutiny of Master's/PhD theses, and so we have an epidemic of plagiarism in Europe. Every month some politician here gets exposed for plagiarism, and no wonder.
Just to illustrate how bad things are in Europe, another friend of mine who wanted to study psychology had to wait SIX YEARS to get accepted into the program on account of the tens of thousands of applicants. And even when he finally did get in, there was the problem of finding student housing since if you come from a poor family, the miniscule grant you get from the government for housing is just a drop in the bucket compared to monthly rent prices. That's another problem by the way in Europe, the lack of meaningful financial aid for students. The financial aid I received from the US to attend school here in Austria was roughly equivalent to the average yearly salary after taxes - all my Austrian friends were envious and amazed. I remember I once had to write a paper, for which I needed a certain book. I went to the library and was surprised to discover that there was no one manning the librarian's desk. This was one of these libraries where you couldn't get the book yourself, a librarian had to get it for you. I went next door to the secretary's office and asked what was going on. "The librarian is out sick", she said. "Well, isn't there anyone else who could man the librarian desk?", I asked. "No", she replied, "because of budget cuts he's the only librarian on staff. Try again in two weeks!". Welcome to the absurdities of government-run universities! I can't imagine something similar ever happening in the US!
Sorry, Curtis, but you've given no reason as to why US universities are supposedly better, only a bevvy of reasons (justifications, mostly) as to why you have to pay so much just to attend.
I'm not interested in swimming pools, police stations or separate postal codes if I'm saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that I'd have to pay off for decades to come.
The fact of the matter is this: european and US universities are roughly the same when it comes to education. The difference lies in the ranking system. US universities place at the top mostly because of the research they do (something the ordinary student doesn't benefit from). In europe research is seperated from education and conducted by research facilities (for example the Max Planck Institutes).
The question then is this: are you ready to pay for unnecessary, superficial stuff that ultimately doesn't affect your education? People need to answer that for themselves. I know where I stand on this - and given all the surveys conducted on the effectiveness of US higher education, it seems that american alumni come to the same conclusion.
@@roaldruss4211 All of those clubs, extra-curricular activities and "swimming pools" provide American students with immense advantages not available to their European counterparts, namely leadership abilities, real-world practice, social competence and professional networking. By participating in the plethora of clubs, sporting activities and Greek life, American students learn strength of character, they learn how to oversee and manage a work group, they learn how to negotiate various social situations, they meet and network with alumni and other important stakeholders, thereby providing a stepping stone to a meaningful career. Take my situation, for example, I was heavily involved in the arts in college, including the popular men's acapella group. Because of these experiences I learned how to present myself (through acting experience on stage), how to speak eloquently, how to behave in difficult social situations, how to cope with demanding time schedules (having to juggle a full study load plus excruciatingly demanding rehearsal schedules), I learned perseverance, how to give my best, how to pace myself under pressure (having to deal with difficult Broadway directors, repeating dance routines over and over and over again at 2AM to their satisfaction, etc.). As business manager of my acapella group I organized our annual tours that took us all over the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, this entailed contacting hundreds of performance venues, negotiating fees and terms with their managers, drafting contracts, working under immense stress trying to organize minute details, working the phones till midnight, resolving conflicts and misunderstandings, etc. Then there were the challenges of dealing with the university administration and student government, staying on top of our 7-figure budget, drafting reports to the student government, preparing audits, filling out paperwork (we were a non-profit student group), dealing with all the politics of the university student government (which was every bit as absurd as national politics), organizing our transport on tours, accomodations, meals, doing PR on location. Then there were the fans, the THOUSANDS of fans that would inundate us after each concert, learning how to deal with all that, learning how to deal with the dozens of invitations you receive for dinners, radio and TV interviews, dealing with the parents of fans who demand favors for their kids so they can get into your school and join your acapella group. Then there's the alumni networking, we have about 500 alumni over the past 40 years located all over the world that are involved in every professional field imaginable. They/we form a close-knit network that help our young members launch their careers. We provide guidance, funding, we've established a yearly scholarship open to any college student with good grades interesting in the arts, we offer internships in our individual professional fields, we do a lot of charity work and fundraising and we're such a tight knit group that we know all each other's wives, kids and families. We are best friends and worst enemies, we meet every week, we're there at each other's weddings, we're there when one of gets divorced, and yes, we're there when one of us dies. My membership in this acapella group has OPENED DOORS for my career and provided me with unimaginable advantages and opportunities too lengthy to list here. Suffice it to say, I wouldn't be here today were it not for my college acapella group, and I wouldn't have the social competences that I have now if it weren't for my college experiences in the arts and stage.
My European college friends, in comparison, have neither access to these types of extracurricular activities nor the advantages of the networking they provide. And the difference is noticeable immediately. Whereas American college graduates tend to be socially well-rounded and able to easily navigate various social situations in addition to possessing a high degree of flexibility and adaptability (at least college grads from the late 90's), I've noticed this lacking among the European college graduates I've met. Whereas American college graduates already have years of professional experience in their chosen fields in addition to LEADERSHIP abilities, European college grads are having to start from scratch. There are some European universities that are now starting to experiment with forming partnerships with private companies, but these efforts are still in their early formative years. By the time I got my first job out of college, I'd already had years of leadership and organizational skills, and so was promoted to head my own department only after SIX MONTHS. This does not happen in Europe. Now granted, there are some very ambitious college students at European universities who, despite the lack of clubs and extracurricular activities at their universities, will actually seek out their own internships and get involved with private organizations in their communities, but this is the exception, not the rule. But these same students usually tend to be the ones who get very far ahead and who eventually get the best jobs.
As to tuition fees, you're woefully mistaken as to how this works in the US. Yes, some universities charge absurdly high tuition fees (which then subsidizes the tuition fees for poorer students, so that they either study for free or pay a very low tuition), but you overlook the fact that a degree from these universities almost always guarantees a high paying job, which enables you to quickly repay these tuition loans. I paid off my student loans in just a few short years, and the same goes for most of my friends from college. As a matter of fact, since I live in Austria, I earn the lowest among my circle of college friends, many of whom easily earn 10+ my Austrian salary. When they visit me here in Vienna, I realize they have the type of lifestyle I could only dream of! The only people who are truly disadvantaged by high student loans and who end up in these documentaries on the subject that they LOVE to show on European TV are students who chose to study low-demand, low-paying majors like those in the languages and arts. As career opportunities in these areas are low, then of course you'll have a hard time repaying your student loans. But most students who choose a STEM subject or some other high demand major will most definitely be able to repay their student loans in no time.
No test admissions? Come on. In England and France you need to do very well in advanced university entrance exams to get admissions to top schools.
I think it's analogous to comparing Linux to Microsoft or Apple: Linux is to Europe what Microsoft and Apple are to competitive US capitalism. But the UK is catching up where I only have to look at the ethnic makeup of the audience in Oxford university debates to see the university is far more globally competitive today compared to a few decades ago.
How the hell did I stumble on this I listen to this 10 times now
Felt the lack of your usual VisualEconomik enthusiasm
I don’t agree that European universities are lagging behind those from the US, and imo the reasoning you’re using in the video is the exact core of the problem: I’ve paid around €1.000 in total for my complete masters degree in my Western European country and I’m now making a decent middle class income. If I wanted to take on the same studies in the US, I can add a few zeros to that number. Given that we know that a less equal society = a worse society, I think we’re doing just fine in Europe.
I think you make a good argument for European universities being a better value given the cost but being a better value doesn’t necessarily mean better (or worse) quality
It is only at the same level if it is in UK. Everything else in Europe is only the best if you take it based on rankings. I know people who had masters in STEM in Switzerland and could not find work
Cope.
@@PhilHug1 agree, although that depends on your definition on what the function of a university is. If it's to benefit society as a whole, I'm more likely to say that the European model is in fact better. If it's to give maximum chances to the top 1% of the top 1%, then indeed American Universities are doing a lot better. But for me personally, I'd rather have more people having a decent life than just a few lucky ones.
@@Parakeet-pk6dl a degree does not mean a better life for majority of the time. In fact, majority of the degrees especially those that are not in STEM leans more towards indoctrination rather than learning or employment.
Fundamentally they have the most money. It means they can buy the most advanced equipment but also buy there way into the best science journals and boost there metrics. It cost >£10,000 to publish your work in the best journals. So the richest will always do better
There is a lot valid criticism to the superiority of American universities.
1. In what areas can a university be superior? It seems to me only in STEM. And even then, only in certain areas. When we look at the nobel prizes recipients for physics and chemistry, we see that they used very expensive methods for their research. The vast majority of universities don't have those means and that is not necessary a bad thing. I think it is very valid for a country to decide that they are going to focus on their students to get the high education they need and if there are highly intelligent and driven students, they will get a scholarship to an American university. A pragmatic approach so to speak.
2. There are areas not so relevant for most countries like space enginering, marine biology, automotive enginering etc. very few countries have companies that are involved in those areas and/or don't need to excel in it.
3. The question should be whether a university is providing all the knowledge and skills needed to further the students ambitions and career. Student should not have the justified feeling that their education was insufficient. I don't think that is the case.
4. a university with 50 billion dollar in assets is batshit insane.
5. Looking at the number of published papers to determent the status of a university is flawed. What determents a good university is much more than just research.
Excellent points
Unlike what is stated in the video, the tenured professors in US universities are practically impossible to fire - that is what I've heard.
Is it wrong?
That is true mostly for K-12. That's why the level below university in US is a joke. When you jump from grade school to universities, the level is so huge that if you are not prepared, you end up with F and D
@@Bthdk
You mean it is true mostly till Class 12 ie schools? And not for universities?
@@manubhatt3 yes. Basically, from grade 1 to 12, these teachers belong to teachers union and they are extremely powerful. They donate big time to the democrat party. There was an instant where a pervert teacher gave students cookies with his sperms on them. He did not get fired and only got put into a room so he wouldn't be able to teach while still earning full salary.
@@manubhatt3 yes universities operate differently to k-12. For example, CTA is in public schools k-12 and community system. CSU and UC are not in it. The universities have more control and the levels of education are much higher. That's why my advice for younger kids is always to enjoy the time in high school and under but focus once in universities because it's more serious.
I expect to see this change going forward.
Firstly Asian countries are catching up by investing in their own education programs
Secondly the meritocracy that drove the best students to the best universities is being undermined by the DEI programs which while socially very relevant create another set of problems (from students who can’t cope to forcing the merit students to go elsewhere).
Thirdly the US universities have now gotten bloated. Administration costs make up for a large chunk of the Student’s tuition fee. Many classes are taught by TAs as the professors are focused on Research.
US Universities are now offering programs in areas that offer few real world opportunities.
Asian people have an excellent work ethic. The Asians that I went to school with went the extra mile and were rewarded for it. Yes - It's a cultural thing and the various Asian countries will and are being rewarded for this work ethic.
@@daniellarson3068 Asian parents also sacrifice and expect a lot from their kids. They will go the extra mile and expect that the kids understand that effort is what gets them ahead. I have seen universities progressively raise the bar for Asians and the Asians just put their heads down and work that much harder. They are polite and hard working.
@@navinadv Yes they guide their children. You can either tend a garden or have weeds. You get the analogy.
Nice diatribe buddy, I'm sure it's DEI that's causing educational achievement in US to decline.
They focus on the quantity of research papers instead of how much that person's papers are cited by other papers? That is some BS, haha.
Fascinating.
Oxford and Cambridge just looked at each other and said "wut?"
*Choice of classes/Selecting a major later on* : those was a HUGE lures for me. At the end of high school, I managed to leave my native Europe and attend US universities. I put that freedom to good use, and pursued a complex interdisciplinary approach that has served me well in life.
HOWEVER, back then, US universities - while hardly cheap - were not the astronomically-expensive ripoff that they have sadly become 😵💫
ahhahahaaha the title made me laugh straight away, you're good man
Why you laughed
If you want education, go to a European University. If you want to do an insanely expensive project, go to US
If you mean that you can go to the U.S. and get a useful degree and a high salary afterwards, then yea, that's what the data and my personal experience also say. But that's an odd way to phrase it...
that's nonsense, just complete nonsense.
and if you want the leaders in the field that came from the best universities, recruit form the US.
What a cope. I can get an education online, but that won’t ensure me any type of job. It’s really all about credentials, american credentials are just better and more prestigious.
Nope. It’s about ‘training the mind to think’ (Einstein) and you can’t do that autodidactically.
US student. This video is talking way too broadly. Yes we pay higher tuition, but our state governments are also cutting spending on education so that’s a given. Yes we have some of the worlds most elite universities, but we are also a huge country, huge. India and china are larger, yes, but they are also not developed countries, they don’t have the history or time to have created these institutions. Also, these elite institutions don’t actually take the best from the best, they are business as you said, so they take in what’s good for them financially. Rich wealthy donors are that market, so now you have a system in which legacies (students who are children of parents who attended the institutions in which they apply) have a 70x higher chance of getting in than the traditional population even all other aspect being equal. These elite institutions don’t take the best of the best, they only SOMETIMES take the best from the best. Also, applying to an Ivy is a essentialally luck, you could have perfect stats, a 1600 SAT, 36 on the ACT, perfect 5.0/4.0 gpa. 10+ extracurriculars, but you will always be passed on if your direct competitor is a legacy. Even if their stats are not comparable.
This !!!
I have always dream of being in a US university but the tuition fee is too high. Also there is a really huge unjust to Asian student in the admission process. And genuinely this video treat US like a golden child. Personally I feel like this is a promotion video about how to broke your wallet on what you definitely don't need that much.
@ don’t let people lie to you, there is certainly some unjustness to Asian applicants but it’s not that extreme. Understand that universities in the United States care about merit to a certain point, once you “qualify” it’s more about wether you fit a certain role. It just kinda happens that certain groups fall into certain roles and it ends up causing an imbalance where certain groups then get marginalized as a result. Harvard does not want 2000 CS majors from the west coast that all have 4.0 GPAs and wanna focus on AI. It’s not unique in any sense and they don’t nor do they want to accommodate so many similar students. International applicants are sometimes treated more harshly but it’s also not your institution’s so it’s not really on the United State universities to accommodate you. As for financials, I would be on the look out as plenty of institutions do offer aid to international students, the bigger issue is getting accepted without being a full pay student.
There is another factor you didn't mention. I understand why it might be uncomfortable, but it's a very important factor: in WWII and the decade before it, Europe threatened and eventually killed off its Jewish population. Around the same time, US universities were repealing overtly antisemitic policies and accepting more Jews. It's not a coincidence that the three scientists mentioned in this video - Einstein, Bohr and Oppenheimer - were all Jewish. This is a nation that has disproportionally produced top scientists. Unfortunately for the US, this factor may be waning in the near future, as antisemitism has again reached fever pitch. It's likely that less antisemitic universities in the US, plus Israeli universities, are going to benefit the most.
You make an excellent point and one missed by the person who posted this video. The Nazis were anti-intellectual which vitiated German and Austrian intellectual life. Prior to the rise of Naziism, German universities were among the best in the world. Indeed, the philosophy of having higher education being research-led rather than teaching-led was orginally German. It was imported into the US in the late 19th century but didn’t really gain traction in the academy or wider society until the influx of academics - many of them Jewish - fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s.
It seems to me that all of these problems can be solved if Europeans just change their laws and policies.
`I am surprised that China does not even have one to make the list
You make a really good point about universities in Europe being constrained in hiring personnel by bureaucratic criteria usually coming from the government. You refer to scientific publications as a major metric. What you don’t mention is a recent criteria adopted in the last decade which further exacerbates this trend: DEI (diversity equality and inclusion). This means hiring a professor because they are black, not because they have produced anything of merit. The flip side of this of course means not hiring because a candidate is white regardless of anything they have produced (put simply, reverse discrimination). Of course the USA is not immune from this, indeed I think that US universities are even more prone to this tendency.
6:43 this video is very American. Only looking at 🤑$, growth, output, and economic viability. Dismissing the humanities at UNIVERSITIES is almost disgusting. "Adapt to the new professional reality"? Since when are universities supposed to teach what the majority of people need to know? 100yrs ago, most people were trade workers or farmers - does that mean universities ought to adapt? I am working at a university here in Austria, and although I have a business background, I appreciate the humanities a lot, actually even more than business studies, even though the latter is "more needed" economically.
America # 1 🇺🇸
In which country will a university degree earn you the most money?
USA
Awesome
I never knew a Debt Trap containing Lies and Propaganda would be valued as "Knowledge".
A well-researched and thought-provoking analysis! All of the factors mentioned in the video are certainly spot on, but the biggest factor is certainly the enormous supply of money the top American universities receive. I mean if you give company A $50B to design a car and company B $1B to do the same, most probably A is going to produce a higher quality product. The relationship is not perfect, but when replicated multiple times, it tends to be true.
There might be inequality, but not in the traditional sense. Thanks to those large endowments and universities competing for the best students, poor but highly academically qualified students are often able to attend great universities at an extremely low price. From my own experience, there was almost a direct correlation between the ranking of the university and how much I was expected to pay. My parents made me apply to average-at-best local universities while I knew the best opportunity came from big national universities and it ended up that all of my elite picks I got into offered much better deals then the local universities and even slightly better than my still pretty highly ranked flagship in-state university.
In top 10 world university list 7 from usa 2 from england 1 from switzerland
Sorry but I disagree.
Best university in the world are in Europe and then Asia.
Especially in Asia as their average person tends to be more knowledgeable about the world in general.
If by best you mean creating student debt and crippling entire generations then yeah, in that nobody can beat US.
😂😂😂😂😂 what a joke ...dont make me laugh .
china has 13 nobels while usa has 380 nobels
asia is ajoke dude
Sorry to you . Cope dont work . Europe was better now its a joke . Admit it . That will be better then living in your own fantasy. This is coming from an asian .
I once attended a microchips programming training with my MIT and Stanford colleagues these people just read and write programs like spelling their own names.
So do people in top universities elswhere. Anywhere you get a high concentration of talent.
I have a friend who can play chess in his head (i.e. not seeing the board, just hearing moves the other player makes, like pawn D2 to D3), and do it pretty well. He lives and breathes mathematics.
I have a friend who just got into cryptography and is also an accomplished programmer... and has Linux on his _phone._. Double IT and Math major.
PhD student who actually slept through most of his lectures in previous years and coasted top 10 in his major. Also 3D printed a working violin, because why not?
Friend who sells their Blender 3D designs to people, nanoengineering student...
Lab partner who has a basic lab in his own home. Can prattle off chemical info like a machine gun.
_Boyfriend_ who has a basic lab in his own home.
Then there's me, the failure lol. They've tried to poke at me and fix me lol, because I struggle so badly at university. Somehow we're still friends (and bf/gf).
It's because people value investing in the US and education is seen as an investment. Along with the tendency for Americans not liking to work for someone but instead be the boss of their own business. Also immigrants are highly driven individuals that fit perfectly in a competitive capitalist society and the US takes advantage of it. Most of the science graduates in the US are the children of fist generation immigrants and foreign students who often want to stay in the US. Compared to the Americans who are more than 2 generations American. Also the different policies and freedom every state has to drive their education system in which ever way their state benefits the most. Every state has different University systems and that adds to the competitiveness and specialized investments in certain departments of universities.
The US values investing in education? Not for half a decade, mate.
You might have some of the best universities, but your level and quality of general education is atrocious.
@@Emanon...hmmm elaborate?
Salty europeans in the comments
TLDR: Because money.
tldr: the US has a free market university economy. Europe has socialist protecionism and lags behind in tax dollars/ output
Not quite. Federal loans in the US fund uni payments.
You have to be open in every way to compete with the US. And that’s mainly alluding to cultural change, Europeans don’t want new people to come or the culture to change at all. US has been the opposite.
@@DivinesLegacy As a European I have to say this is simply not the case. But the liberal left loves to mix Asylum, immigration and basically recruitment together.
The best people can get Visas in basically all countries if they work hard to further society.
Now the mediocre people , of which I am part of, are welcome too generally but should be called into serious question with the advent of AI.
And then there is Asylym, which makes absolutely no sense. Draining a population of its IQ people, and in doing so lowering the IQ of another population half way accross the planet, whilst importing previously localized cultural problems is insane
@@DivinesLegacy What about China?
@@koushikdas1992 China is a unified state of 1.4 billion people. For now they don’t need more immigrants. They have so many people that they don’t need to rely on the world so much. Europe has a declining population and is divided.
The way they are judged are based on Projects, not actual education.
Coming from a student in the EU (ULB - Belgium), I'd say it's pretty good the system. I am privileged because my faculty is small (polytechnique), so my perspective may be different.
From my point of view, the only limit we have is money. If European universities became research centers that are run like companies, they would raise tons of money and also make countless publications.
I am an undergrad, and for my case our means and resources are enough for teaching as the primary activity (Idk much about research). I have never been in a study hall of more than 200 students and 50% of the classes are given in small 25-30 student groups. In all my time, I never had an email go unanswered for more than 24 hours by a TA. While the inbreeding thing exists, we also know the inbreds and they have a reputation: they were the best of the best in two or four consecutive promotions, probably had offers across the Atlantic but I think Belgians don't like leaving their cute small country. One I had the privilege to learn from was this guy who basically did a full maths bachelor in parallel with his engineering studies. He runs circles around pure mathematicians and physicists alike but maybe funding isn't easy to get for his research (as is the case for many).
We do fun projects and sometimes with our own money we do crazy things and its a lot of fun. I know however that once you want to do scientific research the money thing hits you like a 500 ton hammer. I heard mates talking horror stories where one student in like 10 or 15 elite kids was taken for a PhD program, that is 14 good researchers that were lost and this probably happens a lot.
So, the fun for everyone will last until the day we get our engineering diplomas, then those who go into industry will be happy (very) and aspiring researchers (the cum laudes and above) will either smile or cry a lot.
It's true that US schools beat EU schools on research, but that will be solvable once there is more money invested in.
A few miles from my city, we have KULeuven in Leuven and it is a perfect example of what a European school becomes once annointed with tons of money.
Emigration rate from Belgium is higher then emigration rate from USA
Idk what you study at ULB but some of my friends study there and they tell me that, at least in the first year, you'll have way more students than what the classroom can hold. One of them said they were 1000 students for a classroom of 300, maybe 350. Yes, some students don't attend but still they had students in the hallway looking through the door to follow the lecture.
@@tiagozadra4307
I study engineering at ULB. Your friends probably study psychology or one of those other popular majors. I have a friend in computer science and there, they are like 600-800 in the first semester of the first year. It never happens for us in engineering. Maybe it's because we have admissions exams that weed people out while in other faculties (except medicine as well), everyone with a highschool diploma has a RIGHT to admission (you don't even need good grades in highschool, it is your government-given right).
The most important thing is that we have the means to have all the fun possible. We have means to do all sorts of projects (and we do lots of them in labs and some in garages) and our instructors are always there for us anytime anywhere ESPECIALLY in the first 2 years where things are can be a bit harder for the average student who is admitted.
@@KP-kg2ky ah I didn't know that for engineering it was the same as for medicine. Still tho, the majority of courses are a bit fucked
@@tiagozadra4307
The difference is that medical admission exams are corrected by the government while engineering ones are corrected by individual faculty committees at universities and recently, a quota for medical school admissions was officially established.
I wouldn't judge other courses' quality because I never followed any of them.
What about Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh?...
There are indeed quite a few US universities in the top 20. However, if you look at the top 100 Universities in the world, the number of US universities that are on that list is actually quite low compared to how many people live in the US. They only serve a tiny percentage of the total university population. As a matter of fact, looking at the big picture, the quality of the education that the average American can enjoy sn't particularly high, especially if you compare it to how how much these universities cost. If you look at counties like Australia, the Netherlands, Korea , or Zwitserland, for example, they do much, much better.
"especially if you compare it to how how much these universities cost." -- You might as well say fashion is important to education quality. IMO, what this gentleman gets wrong is the general importance of university education. Universities are lumbering dinosaurs, imo. The Internet is making education almost free -- for those who seriously want it.
Everybody knows the US has the world's best colleges and universities, but that was long back, US colleges and universities these days are not of US anymore, even though it's in the United States, but are controlled by either china or Muslim immigrants, most Muslim immigrants, if these immigrants wants then they can even make entire US college's and universities bleed like they did by protesting in support of Hamas recently. So funny thing is, these colleges and universities are on US soil only but pretty much own by Muslim immigrants.
Having taught in both American and European universities in STEM, here are my observations:
1) The lack of "community colleges" for those students who wish to continue their studies after secondary but don't need a university degree.
2) The lack in cooperation with businesses in the area - in the US my CS department had an advisory counsel made up of local industries who hired our students. The idea of getting advice from "outside" the university was frowned upon in Europe.
3) Alumni engagement was non-existent. A student graduated and perhaps came back 50 years later just before they died to see how things had changed. Of course, the lack of big-time college athletics might be a major contributor.
4) The idea that a professor could not show up to class except sporadically and not get fired was eye-opening to me.
5) That we had professors of CS who were still teaching what was taught 50 years ago and would not change.
Before we can comment on why the US has the best Unis, we should analyze whether the ranking criterias are accurate reflections of how students do well. Is it salary? Not always since Harvard students would go to Wall street or big tech. Is it research? Not really, the research of the few do not represents the mass. I have worked with people who used to go to Havard or MIT and I would not say these are the smartest people that I have worked with. If you are multimillionaires and you can easilily spend hundreds of thousands for your kids' education then fair enough but otherwise not often be good investment.
I don’t mind that top private universities raise money for funding the way that they do however I feel that the singular most damaging thing that has happened in the last forty years was the percentage of public funding that was cut to state universities and local colleges that was provided by the federal government. Nothing has escalated the price of college education for middle and lower middle class students and thei parents more leaving students with tremendous student loan debt.
"be that as it may"
Don't forget an important aspect of the rise of American excellence in education: all the Jewish professors, teachers, researchers and doctors who fled Europe in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism.
Haven't Cambridge University and Oxford University beaten US Universities few times under the World University Rankings (World Reputable Ones)? Though yes, US Universities still are the World's Best during Most Times
Yes but the US has more
yes. also, German universities are wildly underrated by the uni ranking system. for example, German universities for Physics work alongside the Planck institute, which has Nobel prize winnings Physicists teaching the German Physics students in their courses, and much of the funding comes from these institutions too. This doesn't get accounted for in the uni ranking system, since it's considered an external organisation, even though it is an integral part of the German university teaching system. (My knowledge is limited, so I can only give what I know. ngl, some of the German unis are better in Physics than Oxford is imo)
Check out other rankings . Usa universities is the best.
Also Edinburgh
The US may have the "Top of Top" Universities, but beside them and some more "elite" ones, probably more than half of them are at best "average". Fees are way too high and that leaves a lot of people into student debt. And if you don't study in one of those more upper level universities, you are not getting your moneys worth. The result is that a big percentage of the people in the US have only high school diploma or some useless college degree. A lot of people are below the middle class. Yes the US is the richest country but the wealth is very concentrated. I lot of people struggle.
Europe on the other hand may not have the best of the best, but has a lot of good universities where you can get a very good education and have a good career. Going does not cost an arm and a leg. The result is that way more of the population have a good level of education which leads to a better quality of life and over all environment.
I agree that the system needs to change in Europe to stimulate the best of the best and gifted kids in order to stay here and push the economy forward but we should also strive to provide affordable education to the majority of the people.
And what are the results? They are beating us everywhere! The quality is greater than ours and the system encourages thinking and how to use everything available to you.
The downside of making university Affordable for everyone and professors immovable from their jobs is that the quality of the students and their research is likely to be mediocre, hence the best and those who move society forward will choose to study or teach elsewhere. So there are trade-offs to every scenario.
And What aboot salaries
Tell us more about the best students in these universities.
You overlook the influence of language. It is a commonplace now that English has become the lingua franca of the world, despite not being the most-spoken! This advantages students taught in English and the most populous country where English us the primary language?
Yeah, you saw that coming, didn't you?
Apparently, it is becoming common for universities in not-English-speaking countries to offer degree programs in which the language of instruction is English!
I assure you: If there's a way to get an American degree in an American university while not being firced by necessity to learn English, it's a VERY well-hidden secret.
I am also aware that as goes instruction goes too the advantage of knowing and learning in English, as an ever-increasing proportion of academic output (peer-reviewed journals in particular) are written in English.
Much as Latin and Greek were once the keys to unlocking setious scholarship, English has become history's third great contender. (The fourth will be whatever native language AI's will develop amongst themselves when they are allowed to communicate freely.)
Money, specialization, flexibility, location in a country that not only reveres free enterprise, but struggles to apply it in the least fertile areas, coupled with a belief in its own exceptionalism (confidence breeds success because a lack of confidence produces not failure, but stagnation) and, well, English, and it would be utterly inexplicable if America did not excel in producing extraordinary universities.
Supply and demand
This video is more about comparing liberalism and communism/socialism in term of education and research
About 30% of students who get into Harvard are relatives of donors or legacies. Legacies are C- students whose rich daddies or mommies went to Harvard. So no, it's not true to say "only the best go to Harvard".
Man, you've gotta stop doing the random song breaks in the middle of the video. They serve no purpose and make me think an ad is playing.
I think this is a bit superficial. It’s not true that it’s easier to fire professors in the US than Europe. In the US, once a professor is tenured, they cannot be easily fired.
Another thing is that the rankings favor universities that use English, which means that they get higher citations.
I think the wealth of the US is a major reason for success be because you need money to buy equipment for research.
It’s important to mention that the best publications in STEM fields are now coming from China and this is due to the fact that there more money available to but expensive equipment for research. China is now luring researchers around the world with good salaries and advanced research equipment.
Why don't wealthy Europeans endow more great universities? They are too dependent on the state and state rules.
Shanghai ranking isn't the most valid ranking. It's just one of the main rankings.
everyone else must have universities that force you to snort gasoline if america's universities are the best
Some details made no sense to me --
e.g. "easy to fire bad professors" - Tenure, anyone?
Also, how is publication pressure different in the EU than in the U.S.? That isn't clear to me either.
Enrolment is falling at most of them, a number are projected to go bust in coming years. Proof that young Americans don't need university to be smart, they are realizing by themselves that the debt isn't worth it.
US university model of focusing on liberal arts like having general education subjects that are burdensome for someone who is too dependent on student loans, so it cannot be replicated in other countries where college students have to work at the same time to pay tuition fees. The Philippines copies the US university model and look the quality of Filipino college graduates from the Philippines - they are academically abysmal.
Best Universities only because they paid for that title.
To pay for universities in USA is almost impossible, the education sistem does not work pretty well. Most of the people get big debts for that, they pay for it during years and years, stopping them to study more or growing economically.
Why would you use the Shanghai ranking, here, to the exclusion of the QS or THE rankings?
What about the high-ranking and well-respected UK HE institutions with strong reputations for research, as well as those in the US?
In general, beyond its click bait title, I feel this video gives a skewed, misleading picture of the topic at best. Most of it bears little relation to the reality in the UK, for instance. Whilst some of your 'facts' are questionable, others are unmitigated crap! Have you actually done any research before making this video?
There's no need to argue; just look at the universities chosen by winners of the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). MIT and Harvard are among the most attractive choices. Similarly, consider Nobel Prize winners.
I'm north american and I'm gonna disagree. The universities you listed at the start are the "most prestigious" but that's not the same as best at educating students. I know plenty of people that graduated from MIT and Harvard, and their experience says the opposite. You're probably never going to see your professor during their office hours and good look finding them. Even graduate students report the same issue.
The university system in the USA is horribly broken. Stop pushing the lie that US universities are the best, they aren't. The reason the US managed to stay ahead of other countries is mostly due to steady influx of immigrants. The tech industry owes the innovation to first and second generation immigrants. Regular tenure professors aren't that high. The publish or perish model is horribly broken and generally bad for society and education.
Firing a tenure professor is real hard and basically not worth the hassle. Lots of tenure professors don't care about teaching and only want to work on research.
Well yeah but I was poor and was able to attend university with less than 400€ month working as part time and with the government aid
Cloning was done in Britain not in america
Oxbridge clear all of them.
The US has some of the best unis in the world but Europe has an equal number if not a larger number of great universities.
If you look at the top end (the top 10) the UK alone has atleast 2 in there (oxford and cambridge) while 2 more have also been placed there over the last few years (Imperial College London almost always secures a lower position in the top 10 and University College London has made it to number 10 once)
Besides those there are many specialist unis in London that are better than most american unis that do those subjects (Such as the London Business school which is ranked 2nd or 3rd in the world depending on who you ask or the London School of Economics and Political Sciences which is ranked in the top 10 for economics and politics)
That's just the UK. There are many great unis on the level of the ones I mentioned above in all of the european majors (TU Munich, PSL, Sorbonne, etc)
So Europe definitely does compete with america in number of top unis.
It does seem that the UK has an outsized number of great schools.
@@rolfw2336 The US and UK both hit above their weight in terms of number of good unis in the top 100 (combined they make up something like 70% of the top 100 but they're only 5% of the worlds population)
UK universities are definitely being pushed down though. (except for thing like oxford and cambridge which will realisitcally not be out of the top 10 even in 100 years due to their outstanding reputation which attracts the best talents from across the world. Same could be said for imperial I guess but the rest are suffering.)
UtSA has government backup for research programs
The mojarity of riches people they have little formal school yet are better than those who have degrees in the universities, it seem universities are obsolete. But am not encouraging you leave, remember don't confuse your school with your education.
6:56 Realization that he joined the wrong major.
Inequality is necessary for excellence. There should be elite training grounds of elite performers. It's the top 5% in any field who advance humanity.
I had an Argentine guy arguing with me that University in Argentina was better than the US, because all students from Latin America go there for school.
I have the feeling that in the US, you either go to a top university or you go to a not so great university. In Europe, or at least in Germany, I’ve not seen too many bad universities. There are some good ones. Nothing like Harvard or Stanford, but good ones like TU Munich, Heidelberg, KIT, Aachen, Mannheim, Berlin etc. I’ve not met a single colleague from a bad university in Germany.
I don't think that is true. the whole notion of going to a procedure school is more of a social status thing Than anything else.
that's not true, there are tons of good but not great universities that non-Americans won't know because they don't get attention in internatonal news just like those good but not famous universities in Germany, there are also terrible schools
while gemany has a decent education, the top geman universities cannot compete with top us universities like harvard or mit or stanford or berkley
Those are not good universities, they are I'll stamp on the less advantaged in society type of Universities, I find the way you present such bad society as the epitome of success quite ironic and frankly prviliged and offensive.
Yep, totally agree. Two things that ruin a society and Visual Economic stands by as no other: neo libertarianism and migration from countries with incompatible moral sets to the west 🙃
I do belief EU universities can improve quality without sacrificing much equality. Including better pay for teachers in general, the ability to fire bad performing teachers and ranking performance (and bonus) on student performance after 5 years of graduation and student satisfaction. Rather than just the number of graduated students.
Because the evaluation system has been developed with the goal to have Harvard as the first on the list.
This video reminds me of something I read in a Sci-Fi novel, whose title, author and even plot are not recalled. However, there was something I read that has stuck with me. And of course I am paraphrasing, not quoting.
All Men are NOT created equal. The potential varies dramatically from individual to individual. The most successful Society is the one that provides Equal Opportunity for as much of its members as possible to reach their own individual maximum potential.
I'm in the US, and as far as academic rigor, I think the US falls far behind Europe. The level of grade inflation we see in the US is significantly higher than US universities. There is also a lot of variation among US universities. There are elite universities like Harvard that only accept the best of the best, but there are also state schools that accept almost anyone who applies. While I do believe that university fees are way too high in the US, I guess it's good that we at least get something in return for those high fees here.
Total BS. I had friends who studied in Italy and Sweden. They would say they get 95-100 on projects for doing nothing . That same paper wouldn’t get more than 75 in the US.
A huge factor of how universities are ranked is by how many foreign students come there and how much research it produces - I'm not sure how important this is for your average student. The majority of people who get a degree are NOT going to stay in the academia. So it begs the question for the average student - is it more important that they can afford to actually get in, learn enough so that they qualify for a good paying job while at the same time not cracking under enormous peer pressure or is it more important that if they get a PhD at that university that they are likely to get the best equipment, grants, etc.
But what was mentioned in the video stands - there is a huge burden with "too many" students per number of staff as well as the industry usually paying a lot more than academia which leads many to eventually make the switch.