I’m pretty sure I didn’t attend with you. I did however attend schools in Bristol and Oxford and spent a ‘luvely’ year freezing my buns off at a military school in Cornwall. My mother is British, as are my cousins and I met my 1st wife while she was attending university up north. I think I have a pretty good handle on British education.
You may have had a poor experience, but to color the British education system based on your one experience is illogical. The same could be said for you presumption without support regarding the Scottish system. And the length of time it takes to earn a degree has nothing to do with the quality of education. The average British 3 year degree seems to stack up very well against the bloated US system for example, which requires repeating unnecessary classes that should have been learned in the lower grades, and required courses that aren’t associated with your choice of a field of study.
Univ of Maryland for my BA (and transfer classes from a British College; Wroxton Abbey). Ball State and Michigan Univ for my Masters. All completed in 6 years BTW while working full time.Although a kid can get out without debt by doing it the way I did then, I can’t see him/her completing it in 6 years. Classes are just not available to do so it seems. At least not here in California.
Sorry, I honestly wasn’t trying to offend, just trying to work out what you meant. And I’m perfectly happy to concede you know more about the subject. I just get confused sometimes when Americans talk about school or college instead of university.
Good for you if you had a good experience in British schools (which I imagine is somewhat more likely in Bristol and Oxford than it was in a depressed part of the post-industrial East Midlands); if US education really is noticeably worse than bog-standard British comprehensive then I’m somewhat concerned. My schools were middle of the road in terms of the league tables, so I suspect they’re somewhat representative.
My understanding of the Scottish and US systems (yes, I didn’t take part in them, so feel completely free to entirely dismiss me) is that that they mandate a broader level of study than in England, which feels intuitively (again, feel free to ignore me) like a better idea than picking three or four subjects at age 16 and continuing to focus down from there. Which is why I mentioned the IB (again, based on what I understand, not what I’ve personally experienced). But yeah, that’s just, like, my opinion, founded on nothing more than a thought that a more rounded education would be a good thing.
I’m perfectly happy to accept that a lot of the foundational classes in longer US/European degrees aren’t especially value added. Although don’t some people push for those in England also now, to get kids up to speed for University with stuff they should already know?
I will say that I think the universities I studied at (Reading, York, Sheffield) were very good. I imagine that they stack up quite well.
So, are you sure you didn’t get a big heap of state support at University of Maryland (and Michigan and Ball State) via the general tuition subsidy?
I certainly did at University of Washington, another public state university.
And then there is the less direct subsidy provided by federal research funding at research universities like that. Most of the income I made in school (I payed for about half of the part of my education the state didn’t pay for) was federally funded lab work.
My ‘experiences’, and those of my family and wife… That carries more weight than one person’s sad tale. You can always find an outlier in any data source.
Luxury! With the data-cap imposed by my service-provider, I should love to see this thread turn into the 4 Yorkshireman sketch. Instead, I have to make-do with a hand-cranked shellac-disc of Ghallagher and Shean and 1 person punching me in the face.
Much like rising college tuition in the U.S., all that extra money goes into the pockets of a whole lot of not-previously-part-of-the-equation, mostly-unneeded bureaucrats.
Somehow ‘administration’ has become more important than the thing that administration is supposed to be running.
Bureaucrats, lawyers, managers, and bankers have the well-documented tendency to take over. In any project/endeavour, hey have to be kept in tight check to not spread outside of the little niche where they are useful. Good servant/bad master.
