“Australia offers a quality education at a lower cost and graduates can stay up to 4 years after their degree.” …
http://www.barrons.com/articles/how-australian-universities-edge-out-ivy-league-1465871669
OK, it’s cheaper and easier. What about quality?
^Okay so maybe no one in the US cares about world rankings because the only thing that matters here is US rankings, (I can see why) but most Australian universities are very reputable in the academic sphere, like ANU is comparable to Columbia according to QS and Melbourne is comparable to Brown according to THE. If you’re talking about quality in terms of job placement, the thing is, in Australia, most people who are college educated would have attended college in Australia, and over there the prestige of the degree matters little compared to the fact that you have a degree at all. I come from Perth and in Perth, a good 50% of the people who are college educated in the state come from just one university, that is, the University of Western Australia. Thus, they are going to find jobs. This makes sense–even if I told you that Natl University of Singapore was ranked higher than Brown in every world ranking, does that make you actually think that NUS grads are more likely to be hired in the US than Brown grads? And if you’re talented, an Australian degree is worth much in the Asia-Pacific area. I once asked my Australian cousin entering the workforce if she had ever heard of Cornell, Virginia, Columbia, or UPenn and she answered all in the negative. My parents attest to the fact that a UWA degree is pretty much all you need to find a decent job and anything foreign or overseas doesn’t benefit much unless it’s Oxford or Harvard.
@ref1ections, I don’t put much stock in QS and THE because they use criteria that don’t have much to do with quality (such as internationalness). In any case, I think that the good (public) Aussie unis are comparable to respectable American publics like UIUC and UF (and are close to them in the USNews global ranking).
In any case, yes, if someone wants to and can work in Australia, an Aussie uni makes sense.
BTW, the global rankings are heavily research-focused, and Brown isn’t a heavyweight there (while Dartmouth is almost a LAC, thus way down on those lists, and why LACs like Williams and Amherst can’t be found).
Definitely not. I’m living in Australia and plan to go to university in Australia, most Australians go to university because the fees are subsidised by the government and they don’t have to pay back until they earn over $50k a year. Many don’t even manage to…they’re essentially going to uni for free and imposing a burden on Australia. Most students are unmotivated and won’t bother showing up to lectures, but instead just watch them online. No one contributes as well, don’t get me started on the horror stories on group assignments…
And we complain about too many international students…
EDIT: If this Asian international student boom, ever pops, Australia higher education system will be hit HARD.
@boundforberkeley , thank you for adding the qualitative level that one can only get from experience. You make aussie unis sound like the French FACs - degree factories. It is a profoundly different experience from the good unis in the US or UK, where there is campus spirit, contact with profs, and attention to the individual.
An advantage is that getting an Australian degree means automatic work permit for 4 years. (In Canada, getting a degree means work permit and 2 years to permanent residency). These countries are competing globally and understand how they can benefit from the H1B imbroglio (whereby offshoring companies take/get/buy whole batches of visas originally intended for internationals who graduated from a US university and are individually needed at a local company and give them to hundreds of foreign workers based abroad.)
The QS and THE rankings blatantly boost UK and Commonwealth institutions. I wouldn’t go by them. If you want to use rankings, the ARWU ranking ( http://www.shanghairanking.com/SubjectCS2015.html ) is more country-neutral and appears more sane, at least for STEMmy subjects, from a research focus.
My neice just finished a specialized engineering program there (ranked 11th in the world for her specialty). Much cheaper than here, and she is taking advantage of the opportunity to work there after graduation.
Numerous British Commonwealth institutions are clearly overrated by QS and THE, both of which are headquartered in London. I ignore their rankings.
ARWU (China) is considerably more reliable, and only one Australian institution makes their global top 50, the University of Melbourne which comes in at an underwhelming #44.
ARWU ranks 6 of the 8 Ivy League schools in the world top 17.
Odd that in ARWU Johns Hopkins and Penn are ranked in the 76-100 range.
ARWU ranks Johns Hopkins at #16 in the world, Penn #17 in the world.
http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2015.html
@defensor Oh, sorry. the link provided in post #8 is the ranking for computer science. :">
CWUR (Saudi Arabia) ranks 6 of the 8 Ivy League schools in the world top 14. Their highest ranked Australian institution, the University of Sydney, comes in at #88.
http://cwur.org/2015/
The worldwide rankings are not about the undergraduate experience. There could be undergrad classes of 700 students and 80% of smaller classes are taught by TA’s. As long as the faculty publish a lot of research they do well in these rankings. The ultra endowed schools like Harvard have the resources to enable the research and provide a good undergrad experience. The rest do not.
The “undergraduate experience” is pretty much an American concept.
I just had to comment on the fact that the cover photo for this thread on the front page is of a group of kangaroos =))
Were they beside a billabong?
This is interesting from the non-student side as well; both of my dad’s brothers ended up becoming professors at Australian universities (coming from the US) because that’s where the jobs were.
@TomSrOfBoston :
I guess I just don’t know what type of experience I consider the better UG experience. In terms of non-academic attributes of the academic experience, many US elite publics and privates I guess are better, but I can’t say I prefer the U.S style of academics at the UG level over a very strong program overseas. If my HS and the US k-12 system primed me (an average student attending a selective school) to be much better in a certain area early on, I likely would have enjoyed “hitting the ground running” with much more advanced material once I got to college. The U.S. has much more of a tracking system and the offerings at elites, especially in STEM, show it. You have them offering the students who went far beyond the curriculum “special” level courses that may be closer to an introductory level of theory (as in serves the masses) in the area at somewhere like Oxbridge. The more average student at most U.S. elites gets more “snuggy” interactions with faculty, but also get taught at lower levels of theory (yes, you get a more intensive and continuous workload, but often the level of cognition for that work may not be the same and may sometimes devolve into busy work which we were kind of used to from HS). Always a trade-off I guess. I always wonder if the less structured schedule of work at those schools leads to more self-directed learning whereas in the U.S. we mostly stick to the beat of the impending exams.