Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Education

Education: Does U.S. 'Catch-Up' At The College Level? 29

Posted by Cliff from the different-society-different-ways-to-educate dept.
nomadic asks: " Reuters recently published an article about how American scientists, as well as foreign-born scientists who work in America, tend to dominate the Nobel prizes in science; it attributes this mostly to the fact that the U.S. government tends to invest more in science research than its foreign counterparts (the National Science Foundation funded 78 U.S. winners before they got their Nobels), and private and corporate entities contribute large amounts as well. The article talks about the scientific and economic culture of the U.S.; young scientists exist in an extremely competitive environment, where they are encouraged to challenge traditional authority. But it only touches on education a little. Now I've seen some truly venomous attacks on the U.S. educational system on /. by people in other countries, but this article implies while the U.S. is behind in science and math education in elementary and high school, 'there is something that happens on the college level'. Does the U.S. 'catch up' at the college level? I'll be honest, the exchange students I've met from more math and science-savvy educational systems have been well-educated, but not on some higher plane of thought that the media would lead one to believe. It seems commonly accepted (though I'm not sure I agree) that a high school graduate from most countries in Europe is on the average better-educated than one from the U.S. How about a college graduate? Graduate school? Is the U.S. dominance in science only about financial investment in the U.S., or can the U.S. university system take some credit?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Education-Does the US 'catch-up' at the College Level? More

Education-Does the US 'catch-up' at the College Level?

Comments Filter:
  • Americans are fanatical about letting anyone have a chance to upper education. If you are 35+ never graduated from High school and dirt poor and want to become a PHD in Physics or become a MD the path is there. If you are one of the rare few who has the brains to make a big discovery you have that chance. It will not be easy but it is not impossible people do it all of the time in the US. Not every country gives its people almost unlimited chances to get upper education. You may not get in to the top schools but you can get in to a lower school and prove your self to get to the better schools. A certain Part of every country's population is "gifted to become genius" most never gets a chance to grow to there full potential. In many other countries if they did not prove there potential early for what ever reason like some people who are very bight but just bad students or they where hooked on drugs and just recently got clean, they miss there window and get shut out. The US system allows many folks to go to a University who should not go, but it gets a larger amount of the ones who should. Americans spend very large amounts of money on state funded University's and on Student Loans and grants and yet they will still give a standing ovation during graduation to a 70 year old student who took 10 years to get her 4 year BA degree with that money. They will spend all day talking about how great it was to see such a thing. I know this to be true because I saw that happen. In the US your education is limited only by your brains and your effort not your age or pass mistakes. This means the next Einstein in the US does not have to flipping burgers for a living no matter how late he or she start or there past mistakes
  • the public high school i went to (one of the ones listed on www.ggusd.k12.ca.us) was essentially a joke. I had two classes in my three years that made me think. Two years into it, i took the California High School Proficiency Exam and passed, then got them to shorten my sentance to three years instead of four. However, the junior college i went to (one of those listed at www.cccd.edu) was definately a step above. (2 years later...) At the start of this quarter i transfered to a 4-year school. (i'm not giving you a url, but its in wisconsin) So far it has been at about the same level, but i have to make up some General Ed classes i missed.

    Some of the differences between college and high school that contribute to a much better educational experience in college are:

    Teachers assume you learned what you should have from the classes you had to take before the current one.

    Pace: what takes a full year of 1 hour a day, 5 days a week instruction in high school, takes 3 hours a week at 18-weeks (junior college) or 10-weeks (4-year).

    Students have an investment in the college, and therefore more ability to do something about instructors who are truly not good educators.

  • I don't know about the US, but in Canada calculus is simply not covered in high school. In contrast, my british cousins are learning basic integral and differential calculus for their O-levels (grade 10 equivalent IIRC).

    At least in mathematics, students in the UK are consistantly two years ahead of their Canadian counterparts.
  • Well, I don't know about other schools, but if you were "ahead" in math at my school, you could take Calc. I personally took it through Calculus two in high school.


    What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

  • Graduates (Score:3)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @10:52PM (#709517)
    I don't have any figures to hand, but based on my experience of working both in the UK and the US (educated in the UK), while Britain has more rigorous Bachelors degrees, far fewer Brits than Americans go on to take a Masters degree. Americans are more likely to intern, Brits are more likely to take gap years to do degree-related placements in industry. So, I think by the ages of 24-25, there's a fairly even match between the two countries, when everyone's finished their first round of college education and has worked for a couple of years.

    After that, it comes down to investment in research, not by the government necessarily, but also by private industry. Britain has experienced many cases of innovators who could not get funding to develop their ideas at home, so left for other countries including the US. The US has yet to experience a significant "brain drain" (as the UK is constantly at risk of), and in fact imports scientific talent from the entire world.

    I think the simplist distinction between Europe and the US is that Europeans are enamoured of the status quo, and Americans are impatient with it. This gives the US the edge in commerce and industry at the expense of culture and history.

    It's up to each individual to vote with their feet and decide where they'd rather be.

  • It's been a many years since anyone in a British school did O-Levels.
  • This is my experience, having had the oppertunity to study at an American High School for a year, although I'm german and brought up in Germany: age 18/19 high school - german abitur: difference is at least a year (and I did have all the AP courses and Calculus in the US) age 22 college bachelor - german prediplom (after 2 years of studies): these are about equal, but that's still about a year difference. age 25 Masters - Diplom : these are equal, time lines meet here.
  • my british cousins are learning basic integral and differential calculus for their O-levels (grade 10 equivalent IIRC).
    No they're not. O-Levels vanished in the 80s, and calculus at that level vanished with them. There is a fair amount of integral calculus at A-level (which is done at ages 17-18), moments of inertia, continuous probability distributions etc.

    In my experience, US university research is excellent because (a) its extremely well funded by the NSF and private sources and (b) it can attract the best overseas researchers (who love working in well funded, high quality labs, and good researchers tend to attract (and produce) good graduate students. Its a virtuous circle.

  • Well, I wish that was the case in the UK but it is simply not, I am stuck, I had to drop out of High School before I could finish my Highers (A-Levels for the English) so I cannot get into college, even if I have the ability, because the person who runs the courses did not like me, so he did not let me in. Now I am stuck out of the system, with tallent, but no where to go, and I am going to have to go and burger flip for Ronald McDonald, even if I have all the experence and tallent in the world.

    As for the Americans being behind us, if what the man above said is true, about anyone being able to access edcuation then they are light years ahead of us brits.

  • Oooh, a nice controversial topic. But one I thought about over the summer, which I spent at University of Wisconsin. And my conclusion was: during Grad School.

    In England, our undergraduate courses are mainly three years, and they are usually just one subject. So when they graduate, our students are typically better (in their major) than in the US.

    But after that, we don't have graduate school, in the American sense. We typically just do a 3 year, pure research, Ph.D., immediately after our undergraduate degree, or possibly after a further single-year masters course.

    Now in grad school in the US, you have maybe two years of classes and then three years of research. This allows you to catch up -- and possibly even go ahead.

    I say 'go ahead' because if you take the same courses when you're older, and when they're directed towards Ph.D. research rather than just passing undergraduate exams, you may have a better attitude towards them, and learn them more thoroughly.
  • Calculus is certainly offered at the high school level in Ontario
    Some of my university friends in Ontario told me that they wished that the high schools would stop teaching calculus, because the students arrived worse off than if they hadn't done any. :)
  • This is a generalization that doesn't necessarily apply to all of Canada. The high school curriculum is set by the provincial education department. In Alberta, introductory calculus is covered by Math 31, which is one of the more advanced courses most university-bound students end up taking. It covered enough calculus to give you a reasonable grounding for a first year university calculus course. At least that was the case when I went through about 10 years ago. Things may have changed since then. Math 10/20/30 utterly bored me, and it wasn't until I got to Math 31 where it got somewhat interesting. Not everyone went the Math 31 route though.

    On the other hand, a friend of mine went to UMaryland to do a PhD in Physics, and early on he was telling me that his first year PhD course work pretty much replicated what we had studied in our 4th year honours undergrad. Having had a chance to look at the undergrad physics programs of a few US universities, it seems that most of the programs run a year behind what I went through at University of Alberta.

    But now I ramble...
    imabug

  • Japanese is such a tough language to read that 9th grade reading level is considered normal for newspapers. In the US 6th grade is normal because english is an easier language to read. (Note, this is mostly related to alphabit from when I understand, japenese appearently like their one symbol per word written language for most communication, but is means you have to memorize many more symbols - when/if they use their other alphabit system the difference dissappears) This despite the 20 hour a day study habbits the japanise are noted for, they have so much more to learn that they are not better for it.

    Speaking of study habbits, you learn more from your books when you spend more time in school. However Most of life's important lessions are gained outside of the classroom. If you are the smartest person in a room with 10 others, you are (Unless you pick a sample well outside the bell curve) still not as smart as their combined intellegence - IF they work togather well.

    Finially I question the need to be number one in math. What is the advantage to science if your students can multiply 1325 by 46562 in 10 seconds, and it takes an american over a minute? turns out none because any reasonable person will put that into a calculator to avoid mistakes. So as long as you know how to do arithmatic on very large numbers that you can do it fast isn't a good point, and if it takes away from other time (play, but learning to communicate) it is accually a liability!

    Many of the students I went to school with were mentally unprepared to deal with algebra, so as a finial data point, let me suggest that we are better off being behind out of high school if it means the fundamental thinking skills are worked on longer for those students. To re-phase that, it is better to have students who understand algebra then students who partially understand calculas and algebra. (This should be combined with my arithmatic example about, there is a fine line between studing something to death and not understanding it)

    Is any of the above correct? I don't know. I know that I'm not convinced that more school is the answer to all complaints that someone else is smarter then me.

  • We had a senior level class where out foriegn born Aurospace prof tried to steer some of us to grad school.

    He said that a European BS degree was superior to an American BS degree, and nearly equivalent to a MS degree in technical knowledge. Beyond that though, American gradaute degree programs are harder than European graduate degree programs.

    He said the European grad program is just a lot of seminars, and not as rigorous as American.

    I did find a big job in what was expected from you at the Master's level as opposed to the BS level.
  • This is exactly right. I went to very good grad school here in the states (which had a large draw from overseas). The students from the British-style colleges definitely had a far more rigorous education in our chosen field (math), but their education was not as broad (I went to a liberal arts college). They were easily what I would consider MS-level. But I think the telling point is that they had all come to the US for grad school.
  • When I was in high school, I wrote an article for the school newspaper about this topic. I attended a magnet school for science and math and got interested in how we compared to everybody else. Most of my research came from government studies which showed math skills lacking in the US at comparable ages and such, so that was the tone I took: US schools suck and everybody else is better.

    Then I got an interesting reply to my article, which we printed in the next issue. A former math teacher at my school moved to Japan to teach English (Japan had been one of my highest praised systems). He told me that the cultures are completely different. Students in that country are expected to memorize incredible amounts of knowledge, including arithmetic and languages, but, as he put it, "they aren't taught how to think." What he meant by this is that creative problem solving skills are not stressed. The focus tends to be "memorize all you can to pass the next set of entrance exams and that's it".

    Later, during my junior year at Rice University, I had a Japanese roommate and got to talk about these issues. He *loved* school in America, and the difference in culture was part of it. He did not advance in his studies as much as he would have in Japan because of language barriers (I explained his Discrete Mathematics notes to him after every lecture because the prof spoke too quickly for him).

    Of course, all of this is the "typical" case, and as always, there are exceptions to the rules. But is is interesting to point out the number of American inventions vs. foreign inventions. RCA invented LCDs and decided they weren't useful, then Japanese investors bought the technology and ran with it. Lasers were invented here and we started making bombs with them, Sony went and made CDs. Plastics research was DOW, internal combustion was engineered into assembly lines at Ford, the whole field of nanotech research was started with the discovery of the Carbon-60 atom (BuckyBall) at Rice, transistors, integrated circuits, a lot of core technology in the past and for the future has been American.

    Yes, the US has many underfunded schools in urban areas, large numbers of people drop out and cannot function at the "basic" levels in reading or arithmetic. Other countries may have lower percentages in those categories, but it's obvious that at some point, the US system corrects itself to get a university system which bekons students from all over the world. American schools are the standard.
  • On grad schools. Most European nations do not have a substantial classroom contribution to PhDs. Thus, a PhD is much faster in Europe and the doctoral candidate has had about 2 years less class work than his US counterpart.

    On college. I find no reason to think there is substantial difference.

    On high school. US students get the short end of the stick. High schools elsewhere are more rigorous, and do not promote students on the basis of age nearly as easily.

    On research. Researchers in most of the world are absolutely starved for resources compared to the US. Of course, this is overly general, and researchers in Scandinavia and Japan also do quite well. But when I talk with foreign researchers, I find they spend much more time planning experiments because resources are so tight. We will do 3-4 experiments for every one that they do.

    The real difference, as you can see, comes in grad school. The US trained student gets 2 years more classwork and several times the resources for the PhD. This of course attracts a large number of high quality foreign students to get their PhDs in the US.

    I speak from my experience in biomedical sciences.
  • The anecdote is that Brits slow down when they do postgraduate work, whereas Americans speed up. And it's sort of borne out by the difference between a taught graduate course, like most US universities, and the research-based doctoral and masters' programmes in the UK. That said, I'd argue that the two taught years of US grad school are basically designed to catch up with European and Japanese batchelors' courses.

    Where the US really pulls away, though, is in its ability to recruit postdoctoral staff from around the world. Most of my friends with Oxford DPhils in science are now working in California, because they get three or four times as much as they'd get in the UK. Too many people spend four years in a science lab here, then pack it in and become management consultants. And it's that lack of investment in research which cripples the UK.

    This all comes from the way that US institutions weight their funding towards doctoral and postdoctoral research. And that's what brings you Nobel Prizes.
  • Hey,

    There's also the small matter that The UK is slightly smaller than Oregon [cia.gov]. When the US has 275,562,673 citizens [cia.gov] and the UK has only 59,511,464 (21% the population of the US), it seems fair to assume we will only produce 21% of the amazing super-geniuses.

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • I would tend to believe that the knowledge learned in the U.S. is primarily not due to college, but rather independent study (and work-related study). Excluding the top schools in the U.S. (MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc.) the educational system here (especially pre-college - high school and elementary) is terrible. However, there is also a huge amount of commercial competition: private companies are very willing to fund research projects in the hopes of a new discovery, and professionals have to be on the leading edge of technoloy in order to be even considered adequately knowledgeable.

    IMO, the schools provide the degrees which allow the step into the commercial atmosphere, and it's the on-the-job pressure combined with the desire of becoming an icon that forces people to work hard, and hence make important discoveries.
    --------------
  • Four reasons would seem to contribute.

    1) As mentioned elsewhere almost anyone can get into a college in the US. Regardless of how well you did before. I went to a state school in the 80's and the only requirement was that you were in the top two thirds of your graduating class, and if you weren't you could petition to get in anyway. Plus even if you go to a 'bad' school for undergraduate you can still get into a more prestegious grad school if you worked hard and score well on your entrance exams.

    2) Huge amounts of money, both public and private, are spent on research in the US. Thus, the resources are available to do the basic research that leads to Nobel prize winners.

    3) The attitude in the US that you have to out do others to prove you are superior. It's the "publish or perish" mechanism of getting a tenured teaching position. If you don't do research AND publish it you will not get the big paying professorship.

    4) You also can't discount population. The US has a larger population then all but a handful of countries. Add this to the easy access to higher education and it makes all the difference in the world.
  • Unlimited access to education is probably the major stimulus in the US. Another may be that the alleged "education deficit" in the US is a myth, propagated by those with a political agenda. It is always popular to cry out that the education system is in shambles, but is it really ? My experience with US public education (secondary, undergraduate and graduate) tells me that the system is efficient and effective, so far as these things can be efficient and effective; I don't know anyone who went through that system and remained uneducated. When a system like this is universally accessible, certainly some will excel more than others, but providing access to everyone insures that you will get almost everyone.

    -- Rich
  • IMHO, of course. :) As much as I'm a fan of socialistic practices providing a good number of necessary and semi-necessary services to people, I think the whole capitalism and entrepreneurial aspect of America is which drives our productivity. While it's capitalism that is pushing us, I think it's creating an almost socialistic type of education system. As many have noted, US companies sponsor so much research and education. You don't even have to be working with cutting edge technologies or even working with pure science, corporate support is there at many levels. Our government isn't too far behind, growing support for tax credits for sending your children to alternate schools, if you don't think they'll get the best education through the public system. My parents sacrified a lot to send me to a private school. My alternative was going to the local public school, where the few friends I had who went there dropped out, which was the site of so much violence, police officers were assigned to the building at all times in addition to security guards, metal detectors and removal of student lockers (often stashes of drugs and weapons).

    Whether it's the government or the many companies benefiting from that system of government which pay for your education, it really doesn't matter too much. We don't have much more ways to go from our education system from being practically socialized to totally socialized. I think this is good, it means our society recognizes the importance of education. One post mentioned how culture and history are sacrificed for this, and while I may not understand the processes behind that, I'd have to agree because we can see those results. Our culture is somewhat lacking, to put it mildly.

    I agree with all the posts I've read here so far, and agree that the factors mentioned are important ones as well, but I think captialism provides the strongest push.

  • Re:Is the US really behind? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Your main point is that the US system allows diversity of education precisely because it doesn't focus so strongly. I agree completely. Communication, thought, and decision-making skills are an important part of being a "productive" person. The relatively lax high-school program allows youngsters to pursue other interests and get the kind of bohemian experiences that a 20-hour work day can never provide.

    A previous commenter pointed out that the US maintains an advantage in industry and science at the expense of culture and history. However, I believe we excel in industry because our educational system is designed to incorporate our dynamic cultural ideals into the "work." Our scientists are required to take philosophy and humanities courses and learn to be more than pre-programmed cogs in an economic machine. I wouldn't give that up for anything, even if it hurts our standardized test scores.
  • We Americans need to be reminded of the degree of access and choice to higher education we have, relative to most of the rest of the world, now and then. Thank you.
  • As a student in the final year of a four year BSc. in Australia, I can say that our perception is that US undergraduate degrees are, for the most part, sub-standard but that a US PhD is a very serious qualification and many students choose to go to the US to complete doctorates.

    The text books we use back up this perception. Since there are bugger all Australian university maths texts we use mainly US texts with the balance made up by a few UK books and translations of other foreign texts. In third and fourth year (and mainly in second year as well) these books are almost without exception flagged as US graduate books while the UK ones are typically flagged for third year undergrads.

    The whole situation with international comparison of degrees is rather complicated and confusing. We have four year honours degrees rather like Scotland and these seem to be regarded as equivalent to English three year degrees because it is usual here to do 2 or 2.5 subjects instead of the English 1-1.5. UK universities appear to accept Australian Degrees on this basis.

    In europe the situation is confused by the names given to degrees. For example, in Sweden (where I have also studied) an MSc. (Mat.-Nat. Mag.) is essentially indistinguishable from an Australian BSc. (Hons) but is styled as a higher degree. On the other, hand a german diploma in maths is an exceptionally scary qualification taking 4.5 or more years with an unbelievable workload.

  • In what way is this different from elsewhere. Here there are a multitude of ways of getting access to university and, in fact, it is in some ways easier to get in if you are classified as "mature aged" rather than "school leaver". Once at university there is support available (although unfortunately it is means tested) to live on and what tuition fees there are are covered by a national non-means-tested interest free loans system wihch you pay back only if and when you start earning a certain amount of money. If you want to go to university and you have the brains and the dedication to apss the courses there are ways to do it.
  • This is a dangerous opinion on these boards--I know there's a lot of non-American readers here. This isn't intended to be inflammatory, so please take it on face value only. And if the moderators think I'm a troll, well, so be it.

    My opinion of this result has less to do with money (invested by gov't or whatever) or numbers (more Americans attend post-graduate education). It has to do with a basic tenant of American education. Collegiate education in America is very broad based. Even if you get a Bachelor of Science degree, you are required to take a fair number of courses in the humanities. And most science/math degrees in the US are actually Bachelor of Arts degrees. That is, the degree is meant to be very well rounded. Over half of your university hours must be outside your discipline. Many universities require that these hours not only be outside your discipline, but in humanaties (for math/scientists) or math/science (for humanities majors).

    This results in American collegiate graduates having a very broad-based education. Now, that, in itself, may not seem to lead to more and better research at the post-graduate level. However, I think that a key element to innovation and creativity is bringing in elements from outside the discipline being studied. If you're only studying math and science after your 11th year of primary school, then you simply won't have as much exposure to areas outside the discipline. This, in turn, leads to a lower level of innovation and creativity, in my opinion.

    The US education is very odd this way. I think it is accurate to say that American high school graduates are *way* behind the average of developed nations throughout the world. And I also think that collegiate graduates are about equal with that of many European nations. What happens afterward is the result of America's broad-based collegiate education, as opposed to most of Europe's (and Britain's) education systems. I single out Britain because I feel that their education system is more broad-based than many other European nations'.

    I also think you can't ignore the atmosphere in America where anyone...everyone...has the ability to "strike it rich" in America by putting in some sweat equity and some innovation. This creates an atmosphere where people try to be innovative. This, in turn, leads to more innovation.

    Finally, I don't think we can ignore the massive number of important minds that come to the States. The business environment in America attracts some of the best and brightest minds in the world. This, in my opinion, is the reason for the large number of non-Americans that are doing research at American universities.

    And, before you reply that I don't know what I'm talking about, I spent half my youth growing up in a variety of countries outside the US. I've spent about as much time in the US as outside the US. Furthermore, before you tell me I'm a pro-American bigot, I think I should add that I prefer to live outside the US. I'm moving to Europe in two weeks, in fact. The better business climate in America leads to a worse environment for living. My wife, for instance, is going from two weeks of paid vacation in the States to six weeks of vacation in Europe. The US standards for vacation and for work hours is, in my opinion, downright oppressive and barbaric. With the good, you also get the bad. It's all a tradeoff.
  • A couple of comments seem to generalised hopelessly (usually on the basis of the UK system) about Europe. The European systems are basically, at least as diverse from each other as from the US.

    E.g. in Germany, there is *no* such thing as a Bachelors (a full "Diplom" is Masters level and takes proportionately long to study). In the UK courses are 3 year bachelors that presuppose a high degree of specialisation in pre-university study. The French system is in some way intermediate, but has many of its own peculiarities.

    At the "grad school" level. In the UK sciences people do a Ph.D intesively full-time, but (if they're serious) tend to "post-doc" for 2 or 3 years. Furthermore, in the sciences there is marked trend to insisting people take a masters before starting their Ph.D.

    In Germany, people typically Ph.D part-time on funded teaching and research posts and take a loooong time. Even then, they would need to take a "Habilitation" before taking on a proper professorship. Apples and Oranges folks...

    Personally, my take is that by far the biggest impact on a nation as a whole is pre-18 education. By then the battle is won or lost. IMHO The UK and US are actually more on the losing rather than winning side. This was something that has been painfully obvious in the UK but has been masked by other differences in the US (immigration, a large and competitive domestic market, sensible Govt. research support, not being flattened or bankrupted in WW-II).

    Email me back in 20 years if I'm wrong ;-)

    Andrew

Slashdot Top Deals

Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind... - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Close