[fiat_fandango]

This is how the united states fails - our education institutions fail to hold the bar and let the pillars of real education turn to sand.

Admittedly, initially in college I was a horrible student. But I got better, admittedly after re-taking a few classes. It cost me, but I learned from it. Not just maths but the lesson of having to grind and struggle to get better at something when it felt like I sucked and had zero intuition for weeks. The latter is what I still believe to be the true value and indicator of a college degree - willing to struggle at a hard thing you might knowingly suck at and keep going (fully knowing some people just master it in hours).

[TheLoafOfBread]

Exactly. I see a lot of people on HN are often bashing European public universities, but advantage of those universities is that you are essentially judged by a third party which does not have any monetary reason to let you pass. You either know, or you are kicked from exams.

[fiat_fandango]

I think the bashing comes in when the topic of rigor / how good the university is comes up. For instance, how do you equitably discriminate to only allow smarter people into universities with an intentionally elevated amount of rigor?

This is inherently discriminatory since ironically enough the root of all inequality is endowed intelligence. The value of giving away free resources of high value is going to get messy, it's why the competition for scholarships to top universities is incredibly fraught with fraud.

[TheLoafOfBread]

The "how good is university" is based on some arbitrary metric, which does not tell anything to the student, but works on foreign students see PolyMatter The Chinese Student Crisis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig

It has even lower value for Europeans, because even if some university in Paris would be THE BEST in the world, it still will have only a national character. For example some guy from Poland is not going to study there, simply because when you are 20 years old, then you can barely speak English on A2, but at that case, to actually understand and learn, you would need to speak French on B2 (of course, we can find rare exceptions).

So in the end you are choosing your school from less than dozen national universities (could be less or more, depends on size of your country) and then you will decide by their program - Do you want to study agriculture university with a program on genetical engineering of plants? Do you want to study technical university with a program of computer science? etc.

All those universities are national (public), there are also some private universities, but you will go in those if you are mandated to have diploma (i.e. some governmental positions). The problem with private universities is that non-governmental employers are not taking them seriously and they will look at you as on somebody who accidentally bought his diploma with his newspapers.

[Ekaros]

Depending on funding system they have quite a lot reasons to pass people. Namely that they are also paid for each graduate by state.

[dqv]

>This is how the united states fails - our education institutions fail to hold the bar and let the pillars of real education turn to sand.

That’s why we should be providing college for free (to the student, it will cost us all money in the form of taxes). If you fail Ochem, it won’t be thousands of dollars lost (yes maybe thousands from society, but the burden is not on the individual). It might set you back, but not monetarily. If there’s a lottery, it should be in the form of selecting who goes where and not a lottery ticket that oddly resembles a tuition bill.

Of course someone is going to say some version of “we can’t afford that, it’s absurd, people won’t respect their education if they don’t lose something, it decreases competition…” but then I guess we’ll have to let the US fall. Guided instruction needs to be as close to free as possible for people and failure to learn something shouldn’t cause monetary anguish, just more time spent trying to learn.

This is why I’m a big proponent of increased funding for my local community college. I will gladly (and do) pay more in taxes to increase funding and decrease tuition. The day they ask if it should be free on the ballot, I will excitedly fill in “yes”.

We really need to shift away from charging people money to be successful. It has made our society very sick.

[tinalumfoil]

I'm not sure the economics of paying for everyone's tuition, but I don't think this is the issue here. NYU has a $6 billion endowment (~100k/student, projecting modestly from Wikipedia's numbers) and costs nearly $40k in tuition after aid. They're flush with money, and so is the average student (or their family at least). Harvard of all places is known for grade inflation, so I don't think low standards is a money problem.