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Lol selectivity for admission to Australian uni's is almost a joke. There is really hardly any 'selectivity'. It is entirely based on your grades. If you make the grade for entry into a particular course at a particular uni, you're in. Each uni also determines their own grade that you have to make for a particular course depending on the demand for that course. Why is medicine the hardest to get into? Because more people want to do med that it far outweighs the number of places available. So high school here isn't geared towards having a right set of extra curriculars or focused on moulding yourself into a desired candidate for a certain university.
That's another thing; I think the system here forces you to specialise and choose your career too early on. You have to decide or at least have a good idea on what you what to do in high school so you have the subject prerequisites for entry into a particular course at uni. In year 10 (last year), we all went through a careers program (although i wouldn't really call it a program) where we had interviews with teacher + your parents and choose a course of study for year 11 and 12 based on what you want to do at uni. We even had to put down a major, ie. bachelor of business. I know myself and a lot of my peers have no idea what we want to do at uni but were being pressured to decide on a career path.
I think if you know exactly what you want to do and especially if it's law, journalism or engineering and you're set on that, then going to an Australian uni is good for you because you can launch straight into that without needing to fulfil any requirements and maybe delay your career.
As for me, I'm much more into that holistic approach of US uni's (even though i'm far from it) and gaining a solid foundation on a broad range of things. It's why the liberal arts of US colleges is very appealing to me because you are not forced to launch into a major you aren't sure of straight out of high school.
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