A government agency enforcing a court order for child support, which is a legal, moral and ethical duty that a parent owes to a minor child, is much different than a government imposing a duty for a parent to financially contribute to the higher education expenses of an adult child.
@Tigerle, your link says "Population with tertiary education is defined as those having completed the highest level of education, by age group. This includes both theoretical programmes leading to advanced research or high skill professions such as medicine and more vocational programmes leading to the labour market. "
“Higher education” as discussed in this thread in the context of the different college admissions systems in the US and Europe is about college education. There wasn’t any obvious link showing what percentage of the population with tertiary education had different types of degrees, which is what you’d really need for an apples-to-apples comparison.
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Yes, I am 100% ok with limiting college to those who can pass X test and I’m fine with a mostly no-frills college experience
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I’m fine with having more no-frills colleges.
I don’t think the euro system pays for room and board. I think the student/family is still on the hook for that.
I would like to see more CCs being allowed to award bachelors degrees for majors that don’t require expensive labs/technology. That would allow many students to get their English, HIstory, Poly Sci, BSN, teaching degrees, etc, there.
But I’m sure if we started giving a test at 14 or even 17 that put a student on a college prep track (or not), we’d soon be hearing screams that too many low income students, URM students weren’t passing the test. We’d also be hearing screams from parents of boys who’d be arguing that boys “take longer to grow up” and are “late bloomers”. And, god knows we’d be hearing from the many who cry that their child is a “poor test taker”.
The American system may be expensive, but I don’t think the meritocracy Euro system would be acceptable here.
What year was that?
Yes, there are some circumstances where a student would be independent while still now residing with parents…but the circumstances why are not things most families want to have happen to them. Child in foster care for a period of time, undergrad student married or the parent of a dependent they support. But then again…someone could be in the armed forces from 18-21 and then be a veteran which would also make them independent for financial aid purposes.
But really…these are the exceptions, not the rule. The vast majority of undergrad college students are dependent for financial aid purposes.
“I don’t believe in need based awards, so”
???
"For those touting European systems, as pointed out in this thread, those are often no frills and better schools are highly competitive. We have no frills community colleges at low costs and even free in some states and students don’t want to attend them. We have combined a sense of entitlement and caviar taste.
What do you mean I can’t afford NYU or UCLA OOS? That’s not fair!"
Literally this. Only ONCE have I seen a student complain that they couldn’t afford college, and then the college they cited was a CC. ONCE. All the rest have been students who complain that they can’t move across the country and afford Berkeley.
BSN requires labs and facilities, right?
(Also, wouldn’t it be “poli(tical) sci(ence”, not “poly(tical) sci(ence)”?)
In terms of low cost CC bachelor’s degree majors, they would presumably have to be the following:
a. Relatively popular majors, since smaller majors may not have enough students at a CC to cost-effectively offer the specialized junior/senior level courses.
b. No labs or other expensive facilities.
c. Subjects where instructors capable of teaching the specialized junior/senior level courses are relatively easy to find. Presumably, this means subjects where there is not a lot of competition from industry for those who are qualified to teach the junior/senior level courses.
We can all fantasize about the expansion of no frills education but… reality intrudes.
A branch of our flagship state U is within walking distance from my house. No, it’s not the flagship, but it’s not a former teacher’s college either. It is a satellite branch of the flagship with a limited number of majors, located in a downtown neighborhood with good bus service across the city (and to a couple of nearby suburbs, small city about 15 miles away) AND terrific train service across the entire metro region. It has always been a solid choice for local kids who can live at home, work part time, they don’t even need a car. Nice, cost-effective choice for kids who want a BA without the bells and whistles (i.e. no frills. No football games, no frats, no climbing walls).
What did the university unveil this past August? Its first dorm for this university. Built smack dab in the middle of the city, I haven’t toured yet but according to the local papers it is GORGEOUS. Part of the U’s “strategic plan”.
I cannot fathom why a university with good mass transit (two blocks from a major commuter train station, bus service across the city and region) would outbid several private developers to build dorms-- with all the bells and whistles-- for a university which has been pulling from mostly local kids.
So our fantasies of no frills do not jive with reality on the ground. The U has been underenrolled; kids want the “going away” experience even to a satellite branch of a state university.
Is it expensive to dorm? Heck yes. This is an urban area in the Northeast, not a rural part of Arkansas where land and labor are cheap.
Sigh. Reality.
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No labs or other expensive facilities.
BSN requires labs and facilities, right?
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I agree with the “other expensive facilities” part, but everyone knows that CCs do have labs for their lower division STEM classes…bio I and II, gen chem I and II, physics I and II, anatomy, physiology, and so forth.
I’d had to look more into it, but often the first 2 years of a BSN is lower division STEM classes. The last 2 years are 8-5 clinical…sometimes mostly done in a hospital setting. Doesn’t seem impossible for a CC to carry out.
Students with learning disabilities are 3x more likely to drop out of school in the US than those without.
My ex boyfriend throughout high school was one of them. He had undx’ed disabilities because his parents didn’t care about him and the school was useless without parental intervention.
You know what would have been really good for him? To take the path that my second cousin’s kid was able to take in the UK: school until 16 and then a trade.
Instead, he dropped out and has worked dead end jobs for almost a decade.
No system is going to be perfect, but this one locks out many, many low income kids because they dared to be poor. My instate non flagship was 25k per year and that was when I graduated 4 years ago. I was able to cover it by hobbling together resourced including a very large outside scholarship that went to fewer than 50 students per year. It doesn’t exist anymore.
I was lucky. You shouldn’t have to be lucky to go to college if you have the academic chops to go.
@SlitheyTove You won’t ever be able to make an apples to apples comparison across all these countries. However, the OECD has developed a fairly intricate system of education levels it considers equal, if not the same. I think they are mostly reverse engineering, as it were, so whatever education it takes to become a nurse in a given country will be considered tertiary education. In some countries, the educational establishment will be called college and will be considered higher education, in others it will be called something else and will be considered vocational education. But at the end of the day, everyone’s a nurse.
In all countries, the level of educational attainment needed to gain access will be much lower than the level you need to gain access to medical school, be it lower GPA and SATs on graduating high school in the US or graduation from vocational track school at 16 versus college track school in countries which track by school.
I do think tertiary education means community college and AA degrees, too.
@mom2collegekids wrote: "
I’m fine with having more no-frills colleges.
I don’t think the euro system pays for room and board. I think the student/family is still on the hook for that."
No such thing as a “euro system”, with 27 member states in the EU alone, but of course there are grants, loans and bursaries etc. to help pay for room and board. But no frills there either - that system I work in, a student is expected to survive on 670 EUR a month, about 790 USD, 300 USD of which are supposed to cover a (single) room, working out to 1.800 USD per a 6 month semester.
I looked at room and board costs for, as an example, Penn State University park, and that won’t buy you so much as a broom closet, in what is decidedly not a major metropolitan area. 3,090 USD for a double and 4,210 USD for a single for a semester, and that s just for when school is in session, which is what, 3.5 months or 4? The cheapest meal plan, again I understand for the period school is actually in session will cost almost another 2,000 USD and you haven’t covered books, travel and incidentals yet.
I don’t quite get where the money goes - are dorms and dining halls really that much more frilly in the US? (I’ve seen pretty frilly ones but then I’ve only seen top privates.) It can’t be that much more expensive to maintain dorms and dining halls in University Park. And is this really necessary, and is there a building, catering and leisure industry getting fat on this?
I get what @blossom is saying, there is a cultural expectation that students have to leave home and go away to go to college, but also a cultural expectation that they have to be exceedingly comfortable doing so. But there is also an expectation, college student being adults, that parents aren’t on the hook for financing it. And nothing is as resistant to change as an entrenched culture.
** moderators note**
Discussion has veered off track and op has not been back
Not an issue that is going to be resolved anytime soon and conversation is becoming circular