Comments on: What Britain can learn from America

By: dearieme

dearieme — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 15:18:15 +0000

Ã‚Â£9000 or Ã‚Â£12000 tuition costs for, say, an excellent three-year or four-year education at Oxbridge or a handful of other places is spanking value. It might be rotten value for wasting your time on some feeble course elsewhere (and friends’ children do seem, by their own accounts, to be wasting their time in Universities that you’d have thought ought to be rather good). The good value will go disproportionately to middle-class children, irrespective of which sort of school they went to – and the lousy value will go to the children of the less well-off or less educated. And this from a Labour government. What a pickle!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 13:29:07 +0000

Katie: Just to clarify, the 1 in 4 figure I didn’t look up – it was in the back of my mind, so I’m not sure how accurate it is. The 37% figure is the rate for 2001, and comes from National Statistics. I had assumed that the graduation rate in the US was higher, for various reasons, but I couldn’t believe that both rates were so low. Will be interesting to explore further.

By: Katie Bartleby

Katie Bartleby — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 09:14:50 +0000

Actually, the Ivy League is only 26 private universities. It’s not as much of a big deal in the states as it seems from over here. Seriously, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton are the WOW schools, and the rest are considered good, but there are a LOT MORE private universities with equal or higher reputations than a lot of the ivies. It was a pretty arbitrary grouping when it was founded. My school, for instance, even as a public school, is ranked higher than one or two ivies.

Actually, I am leaving out community colleges, the corollary to polytechnics, for now. They serve a much stronger purpose in the US than the polytechnics ever did in the UK, and should be considered as an option.

I am going to write some more about higher education, because I actually know a fair bit about it, especially about the private/public debate. Some state universities in the states have taken the LSE route of refusing money from the government in order to have the freedom to move up in rankings (more “foreign”/out of state students) and I’d like to go into that in some depth, especially the funding. Which universities in britain can “afford” to go private? I reckon the answer is the ones with a strong alma matriotic alumnae/i base.

Interesting statistic following a conversation with andrew: the annual drop out rate in britain is 1 in four, leaving us with a graduation rate of 37%. The US average, as of 2001, the last year I got the numbers for, is 50% (and change). Why is that? If it is so difficult and expensive to get through college in the US, and so cheap and easy in the UK, why is their graduation rate so much higher? I’ll into this some time too. Time at university isn’t really well spent unless you come out with a degree after all.

I think the reality is, we’re stuck with tuition fees, but the switch was done the wrong way, and we need to work out where to go from here.

By: Nosemonkey

Nosemonkey — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 09:01:43 +0000

Alternatively, allow the development of an official “Ivy League”, bring back the Polytechnics, and let market forces eventually lead to the abolition of the no-mark courses which are currently being subsidised by the better ones.

(Of course, that could also lead to the abolition of all those courses – History, English etc. – that our dear Home Secretary expressed such a love* for while he was in charge of Education, and the proliferation of things like Business Studies and Golf Course Maintenance which could actually be seen as being vocational and thus with a measuarable market value.)

* may mean contempt