In the US everyone goes to school by law until they are 16. Education from ages 6-18 is 100% paid for by the government. If a person wants to quit school when they are 16 they can though. If you go to college then college is about 2/3rds funded by the state and federal government. If you go to graduate school then that is funded by becoming a teaching assistant and probably only funded about 1/3rd or so by the government. In the US, people really don’t take k-12 education too seriously. College is taken more seriously and graduate school is taken even more seriously. This is the opposite of places like China or South Korea where k-12 (or whatever they call it) is taken very seriously but college is not taken seriously.
How does education, education availability and education funding in India & China work? I have heard in China that k-12 is paid for by the parents and I have heard that getting into university is almost impossible in India unless you are the best of the best. In the US virtually anyone who wants to go to college can, but graduate school is a bit harder to get into.
There can often be fees for textbooks and extracurriculars. There are also fundraisers students are asked to participate in to help raise money for the school.
This is only if you go to a state school. If you go to a state school, your tuition is much cheaper (usually by a factor of four) if you go to the school in your state rather than a neighboring state. Out-of-state tuition approaches the amount you pay to go to a private school.
This depends on what you study. In the sciences and engineering, I know students often do not have to pay tuition. They do research in their professor’s lab in exchange for this.
There are also trade schools or community colleges, which offer 2 year degrees. Students can either get a job with these (nursing, drafting, machining, veterinary assistant), or apply to a 4-year college/university to transfer their credits.
There are also professional schools–namely law, medical, veterinary, pharmacy, and dental, which are not usually considered graduate schools. Students in professional schools rarely become teaching assistants.
In India, most areas have free schools (but there are plenty with no schools at all) but parents have to buy books and uniforms which can be a crushing blow. There are lots of kids who never set foot in a classroom and it’s not at all unusual for kids to work full-time, often in the family business but sometimes formally in factories and the like. There are also private schools of all kinds. Education is highly valued.
I don’t know too much about colleges. There is a major affirmative action program to help socially opressed groups (low-caste and tribal people) get in to college. Only a small portion of the population goes to college. Every college student I met was studying engineering.
My understanding of India was that it was similiar to Korea in the sense that people are pushed really hard from the age of 8 onto their teens so they could get into India’s college, which are highly competitive. I remember a 60 minutes special on college in India where Indians were using places like princeton, harvard and MIT as backup schools if they couldn’t get into an Indian college. This is totally different than the US where virtually anyone who wants to go to college (and can afford the tuition) gets in and most people don’t take k-12 education seriously. I thought there was only a handful of universities/colleges in India and they were hellishly hard to get into. however this site
Says there are over a thousand and who knows how stringent the applications are.
You’re right about in state/out of state school costs in the US. I forgot to add that into my post. However about 80%+ of students are in state so they get cheaper tuition. However I don’t know about a factor of 4. Maybe in california where I hear state funding is better but in Indiana a semester of in state college is about 3k and out of state is about 8k.