It is really a misrepresentation to claim only the ultrarich can go to college.
I teach at a Community College that has very low tuition and financial aid available. The students get a very solid to excellent education, including any remedial help they might need, and then can transfer to a four year collegeor get a job after two years.
My state has three tiers of oclleges- state universities, flagship state university (PhD granting institution) and private colleges that charge a range of tuition fees.
Furthermore, I came from a low income family and was able to attend an elite private college as they had lots of aid available. Not just merit based but need based as well. Not to mention the fact that my PhD program was paid for (including a stipend) by the college as it was in the hard sciences.
While it is not free to everyone, to claim that a college education is just the purview of the wealthy is quite misleading.
Very large loans have become a very large part of making college affordable for American students. Whether that’s a valid solution is an issue for another thread.
Im sorry. My point was that it’s just as its unfair to generalize the university system of the US as it is to generalize the “european” one as the smiling bandit did. I know its a popular meme in USA that “the foreigners envy our freedom” but the governement deciding who gets to go where is just plain ridiculus.
Europe consist of a lot of countries some who are a lot more diffrent from each other than say Texas and Massachusets (to take two examples at random)
ETA: well the governement builds our roads so in a sense they DO decide were we should go.
Regardless, the governments generally do decide who goes where, and they certainly get to decide who gets to go in an absolute sense. Scarce resources will always be allocated in some fashion, and they can either be rationed or sold. nearly every European nation goes with “rationed”.
But I did not comment on that issue. I simply said that the irony was, you could go to college more easily under a wider array of circumstances in the U.S. than in Europe. And that was my sole point.
Well I cant speak for the other european nations but in sweden the governement doesnt set what courses or how large classes should be, the universities do according to resources they have. (Maximum capacitancy in lecture halls and number of teaching staff). Popular courses/ get more spots from year to year and less popular courses get less spots.
Are you claiming that say Harvard Law could accomodate any number of students in a popular course if they just paid for it?
Keep cool, guys, that’s GQ here. The OP asked if graduate programs in Sweden were really free (apart from student union fees), and that has been answered. Whether this is a desirable way of university funding is a totally different issue.
I do not speakee Swedish, but for me one of the hardest concepts about US education is the possibility of having different fees depending on where you’re from.
In Spain each school has different rates, but the rates for any given school-major combo are the same whether you’re from Spain, New Zealand or Zaire; the requirements to get in are the same for everybody (a certain grade in “selectividad” or proving that you have an equivalent level). Financial aid is also not managed by schools. Some schools still honor (pardon the redundancy) the “matrícula de honor” grade, by which you get a reduction in fees after having the best possible grade in a course, but this is rare and growing rarer. Schools will fill in any documents you need them to fill in for your financial aid, but you get it from other sources, not from or through the school. They don’t give financial aid or point you to it. The biggest source of financial aid is governments, be they national or autonomous. I’ve always paid my taxes in Navarra (except when I was living in the USA) and they’ve helped pay for universities in all 50 provinces.
Remember that many graduate programs in the U.S. waive all fees and provide a stipend – not a big stipend, but it’s school paying you, not you paying school. My husband and I did our grad. work in philosophy and we both received stipends.
Exactly what I came in to say. Depending on your area of expertise, you will get paid more or less. Sciences pay about 20k/year. You usually only teach your first year. The irony, of course, is that the particular department decides who gets to go. C’est la vie.
I don’t think that this is that hard a concept. Governments which subsidize schools regularly want to make sure that only their citizens benefit from these subsidies, or at least that these citizens benefit more than foreigners, because the subsidy was meant to provide better education for these citizens to begin with. Many governments think that they should not be paying for the education of foreigners. Of course, things are affected by EU legislation prohibiting the discrimination on the grounds of nationality (yes, I know that EU law in this regard is more complicated than simply “EU foreigners need to be treated the same way as nationals”, but that’s about what it boils down to). That’s why many universities in the EU now have two rates, a domestic/EU rate and a rate for non-EU foreigners; at least that’s exactly the situation with my graduate program in the UK which starts in October. Different rates depending on your origin are not a specifically American thing.
Who gets the available spots is basically decided by high-school grades. It’s not like some government official personally picks who gets in and who does not. I don’t see the problem with this. This selection criteria is much more fair than picking the students with biggest wallets.
FWIW: I’m a US native/resident that attended a PhD program (programme?) in UW-Aberystwyth for several years (mostly at a distance). The area is beautiful and the people friendly, although there appears to be a constant 30-knot wind. Tuition at that time was about $2,500 US per year, which I considered quite the bargain.
