I’m curious as to which of the following American institutions are prevalent in England:
Community Colleges/Junior Colleges- two year colleges that people attend usually either for a license or to take prerequisite courses before transferring to larger and more expensive universities.
Wal-Marts
Water parks
Dinner Theater
No Wal-Marts here, but Wal-Mart bought up Asda a few years ago, one of our largest supermarket chains.
We have what you would call Community Colleges, they are of very variable quality.
Many of these were part of a network of higher education which would supply vocational training from the lowest apprentice levels right up to diploma courses.
Those diploma courses can be extended by the student and can count in themselves to a significant part to a full university honours degree.
In the last ten years or so, the number of students taking these more advanced courses has declined, partly because these are part-time courses which you study whilst still working.The number of fulltime education students doing degree courses has expanded massively.
These courses are quite expensive for these insitutions to run, so now they also teach very many more courses at a much much lower level, the academic level is often around that of our GCSE O-levels, or about 16 years age in terms of schooling.
Wal-mart bought out one of our supermarket chains, ASDA(Associated Dairies) just as IKL mentioned.
The UK supermarket business is differant to equivalent operations in other countries, the mark-up is probably the envy of most other chains, it certainly is not “pile it high and sell it cheap”, you can bet way better value for money shopping around but British consumers are time-poor (not surprising since we work the longest hours in Europe) and with commonly both household heads being wage earners, getting everything under one roof and fairly quickly seems to be most important.
ASDA-Wal-Mart has a lot more own brand goods than most other chains, each unit is far smaller in scale to the US unit.
They have reduced prices, but not by much and other chains, notably Tesco and Sainsbury have had no problem competing.
It almost seems like Wal-Mart has not yet got around to deciding just how to take on the UK market, and have not been as aggressive as reputations would suggest.
Water parks ? Are these the places where you have water slides and lots of jolly stuff like that ? Our climate is not very conducive to outdoor water sports, as it is usually pissing down and freezing.
We have our theme parks but we try to stay dry, not an easy matter in the UK.
Dinner theatre ? Please explain what these are.
Despite the uncongenial climate, there is at least one waterpark in England.
I also found a Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre in London, although it took some searching; I suspect this is an American export that has (mercifully) not caught on.
Dinner theater is a bizarre concept that hit it’s hey-day in the 1970s in the US but still exists, especially in smaller cities. It’s a combination restaurant-theater where you have a meal (usually a buffet) then watch a show. Musicals are most popular, though I’ve seen things as out-of-left-field as SHADOWLANDS (the play about C.S. Lewis’s 2nd wife and her death of cancer- nothing like pork chops followed by a rollicking hijinks of 1950s oncology wards) and MARAT-SADE. America has almost nothing by way of state subsidized repertory theater, so adding a meal is a way of making “little theater” pay for itself. (Usually dinner theaters have their own stock of local “talent”, though sometimes has-been TV & movie actors will appear in the major roles.)
What are community colleges called in England?
Does England have many multiplexes (movie theaters with 8 or more screens) or is it still mostly single screen theaters?
For those who have lived in both the US and the UK, what did you find to be the most pronounced cultural difference between the two?
BTW, thanks for your answers.
England has loads of multiplexes (thogh I don’t think their quite as common in the UK as they are in the US). A community college would usually be part of an English sixth form-college (the difference is that ANYONE wishing to attend university must go through these colleges or their school sitxth forms)
Biggest cultural difference? Good question.
UK; every town and city has a downtown where there are shops, pubs ‘n’ stuff,
whereas the US has everything out of town in malls, arenas and multiplexes.
In the UK travelling 50 miles is a long way
In the US that’s still in the same town.
That’s just a start
What used to happen in UK education is that 16-18 years olds used to stay on at their school and study for A-levels(Advanced)
The grades you got from those would make a huge differance to the university you could choose.
Nowadays, those last two years at A-level are now usually taken at another education establishment, these can be TEC’s which are effectively low grade higher education, or some schools still do run their own A-level courses but not all that many.
TEC’s should not be mistaken for Technical colleges at all, these latter are the ones that provide vocational training, and these are the ones that work quite closely with universities and integrate their courses in such a way that one can step seamlesly from Tech college to university to complete a degree course.
TEC’s do not operate at as high a standard, and often run very basic courses for adult remedial education etc.
Community colleges are usually very local in nature and often run courses in hobby subjects from wood carving, to hand weaving etc, they do a lot of craft stuff and very basic adult learning in computors, literacy & numeracy and the like.
Some community colleges are linked to TEC’s and Tech colleges so that you can step from one level to the next.
Thee is a further division in Universities between what used to be called Polytechnic colleges and pure academic universities.
Polytechnics did degree level (Honours, Masters and PhD’s) in subjects more related to work, such as design, engineering etc, but some have reached such high standards that they blurred the distinction between themselves and the ‘pure’ universities which were supposed to be about research, cutting edge, ideas, innovations.
About eight years ago it was decided that these distinctions between Polytechnics and Universities were too blurred and pointless given the high standards of many Polys, these were allowed to call themselves universities, sometimes called City universities.
Changing the name from Polytechnic to university was more than just a name change, as it allows them to carry out work directly on behalf of industry in terms of research, and they can now raise money doing this, some former Polytechnics have very close ties with the original univerities as regards tutors, facilities etc.
About the community colleges thing.
They’re usually called Technical colleges or techs/polytechnics, or Institutes of Further Education.
They offer GCSEs (16yr old exams) in subjects like art, english, compuers, maths.
AS and A-Levels (18yr old exams) in similar subjects.
Anyone who fails school exams or does poorly in them can re-sit at these colleges in order to enter uni directly the following year.
The colleges also offer many vocational qualifications, GNVQs and NVQs ( general national vocational qualifications, and national vocational qualifications) in areas such as land management, beauty therapy, computer and IT skills, secretarial skills, automechanics, construction skills, hospitality management and so on.
Some colleges offer a two year HND (higher national diploma) course in areas such as photography and media, engineering, computer and IT, estate management, land and agriculture, social working and similar course.
Many HNDs allow their holder to enter the second year of a university course in a related subject.
Often the courses offered are apprentice type, or are part time to allow work experience. The colleges are often where evening classes in languages, pottery etc are held.
The biggest couple of differences I noticed while living briefly in the UK were that no one there is in a hurry except when driving, the beer is infinitely better, and nearly everything there is SMALLER than in America: cars, hotels, servings of food, theaters, towns, families, streets, people, dogs, number of radio stations & TV channels, farms, houses, yards (gardens), boats, factories, pizzas, stores, the national debt…everything. It’s like a miniature US without quite as much pollution and hockey, and more polite, better educated citizens.
Also, they seem grateful for the Americans’ contribution to their culture, but we tend to forget who originally had the bollocks to brave the freezing high seas, the Indians and the King’s men in the first place. We’re not as consciously grateful for their gift of the English language to us, nor eager to use it properly (see this sentence for example), as they are grateful to us that they still get to speak it instead of German as their native language.
“Chiz mite”
Thorpe Park is the best known water park in the UK. It’s owned by the Tussauds Group (owners of Madame Tussauds).
That is not quite how it is in England Irishgirl
Technical colleges are not TEC’s nor are they Community colleges, nor are they Polytechnics
Nor were any of the above mentioned anything else either(usually)
Technical Colleges roots lie in the old Engineers institutes, some of which go back to Victorian times.They are very heavily geared toward industry, providing knowledge of processes, machinery and equipment design and maintenance. In some small towns these institutions run the kind of courses found in TEC’s.
Some Technical colleges have been effectively downgraded to TEC’s.
Polytechnics used to take this approach further with more academic studies, but nowadays the line between design and research is so blurred that these institutions carry out lots of pure research, and they povide industry with specialised academics for projects as a service for which they get paid.Nowadays these have rebadged themselves as universities.
Some Technical Colleges run courses such as HND’s which start wioth the first year, and then the course is completed in a Polytechnic.
Universities were traditionally purely research and academic institutions but are now offering support to industry, many companies could not justify having a team of specialist researchers working for them permanently, so they borrow from the universities and Polytechnics
TEC’s are a much more recent institution, many are simply upper school colleges, taking students from O-levels to A-levels(some do actually allow for students to do O-levels, especially for those who flunked a subject first time around)
TEC’s are geared to providing the lowest levels of higher education, they simply do not have the equipment for engineering qualifications, such as machinery or measuring devices, and certainly not of the type commonly found in industry.
Community colleges are mostly things such as craft skills, or maybe early parenting skills and the like, they do provide remedial education.They do not resemble Technical colleges in any way.
These institutions do not exist in a vacuum and there are many courses that run in parallel, or sometimes you start a course in one place and finish it in another, some compete directly, some are like feeders to other colleges.
Some of the changes look very much like dumbing down, the use of the word TEC for high school education seems to me to be just a way of trading on the reputaion of the Technical Colleges, but the standards are very differant.
Allowing Polytechnics to call themselves universities is similar but here the distinctions have been blurred by the good ones who can genuinely claim their standards are as good as many universities, but it still hides the fact that many former Polytechnics are not as good as true universities.
Dare one ask, what was the food like?
Fretful Porpentine’s example of dinner theatre is the nearest example I can think of in London - even then, this case (familiar to me only from their adverts on the Tube) sounds less theatrical than American examples. More “murder mystery weekend” type stuff repackaged as an evening out or songs (Abba, Blues Brothers) during dinner, than a play. But then I’ve never been tempted.
As for the biggest cultural difference, the one that always bothered me in the US was the complete unfamiliarity with the concept of anything approaching digestive biscuits …
bonzer: NW5? Me too. Kentish Town, Chalk Farm, Belsize Park?
blank stare
…digestive biscuits?
peace,
~mixie
Slightly sweet biscuits made with wholemeal flour.
I’ve been told the nearest US equivalent is a “Graham cracker” but that it’s not really the same thing. I’ve never tried the latter.
Cultural differences summed up - The British think 100 miles is a long way and the Americans think 100 years is a long time.
apologies, casdave you are of course right.
i just tend to assume that northern irish things are the same as the rest of the uk.
which they patently aren’t.
we still have the 11+ for example.
and here we just bundle all the TEC/IFE/Polytechnics/CC into one big building.
I’m not sure if these count as culture, but:
This may be skewed by the fact that I live in the bible belt, but the US is way, way more religious than the UK.
Related to my first point, the big “moral” issues in US politics are complete non-factors in UK politics: abortion, gun control, death penalty, religion in schools, creationism.
Other differences:
For those wanting to know more, and be amused at the same time, I would recommend Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island. This is an affectionate look at Britain by an American who has lived in England for 20 years.
Not it didn’t. That’s what used to happen in England & Wales.
For the most part there is no such thing as a “UK education” system, as you have already discussed with irishgirl
Could we all be a bit more careful about mingling our "England"s with our "UK"s, please. Thank you. 