education systems

[Kotik]

Lately Distracted's "Looper" thread has wandered mildly off-topic with Dis and Linda discussing about the education of their offspring. That got me interested, since I read a lot of fanfic and original stories which revolve around highschool, college, GCSE's, SAT's - it's all Greek to me
So I thought, maybe, we could compare the education systems that we have gone through. I'll start with an attempt to explain the convoluted education system in Germanyland:

1. Basic Education
For basic education there are Hauptschule and Realschule. Both have one thing in common: 4 years of elementary school are followed by 6 years of secondary school. The Haputschule is the lowest available form of education in Germany and - slightly exaggerated - a graduation after 10th class from Hauptschule means "slightly more educated than a chimp". Most of the immigrant children graduate from Hauptschule, due to their language problems. Realschule is the "normal" form of school and is needed to be allowed to attend higher education. In former East Germany there was only one type - the equivalent of Realschule. It had the cozy name Allgemeinbildende polytechnische Oberschule
There are no private schools in Germany. All schools are run by the state and are free. Textbooks have to be paid, but poor families can file a request with the authorities and usually get them for free, too. All schools are mixed-gender.

2. Higher Education
Higher education consists of up to three additional years after 10th class. It is obligatory if you want to go for high education (f.i. university). It is the de-facto standard education in Germany, as any lower education (Realschule only) severely limits job chances. Most of the Gymnasia are state run and free, although there are a few privately run, which cost money. The only advantage those offer is prestige, as entry to universities is strictly decided by grades in Germany.
There is a third kind of Gymnasium the so called Spezialgymnasium, which is for highly gifted pupils. They have an entry exam. There are about a dozen in Germany, geared towards different key areas (math, languages, computer sciences etc). I attended the special Gymnasium for natural sciences at the technical university in Merseburg. Basically after graduating from a special Gymnasium you have the same degree as graduates from other Gymnasia, but Universities roll out the red carpet for you and many of the courses in the first four semesters are already checked off, as they have already been part of your Gymnasium years.

3. High Education (University)
There are two types of Universities in Germany. The Universities and the Fachhochshule (university of applied science). The main difference is that Universities are geared towards research and generally very theoretic, while FH's are geared towards practical application. You can't become a doctor (like Dr. of Philosophy etc.) if you graduate from an FH, so while an FH degree is technically the lower degree in comparison with a university degree, the graduates are usually preferred by companies as they've got more practical experience instead of a purely theoretical education.
Entry into University or FH is two-pronged. For high-demand subjects (like medicine, law, computer science) you have to apply with the cosily named Zentralstelle zur Vergabe von Studienplätzen (Central agency for assignment of university applications). For other subjects you apply at the university of your wish directly. Those subjects that are centrally assigned, usually are subject to numerus clausus, meaning, unless you have a certain grade average or better, your application is automatically rejected. If you are accepted, you are arbitrarily assigned to any university. I was lucky back in the day, I got assigned to a university just 25 miles from home
Up until 2000 most universities were free (although you had to pay for a dorm room if you got assigned somewhere far from home). From 2000 onwards universities started to demand a tuition fee of about 500 euro per semester (1000 per year). Except for very rich gits or students with a scholarship, every student has the lawful right to a student loan in accordance with the (*deep breath*) Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz (Federal law for furtherance of education (yes that's a single word in German (dang I wanted to use less parentheses (guess that didn't work (*sigh*)))))
This loan is free of interest and one has only to repay half of it. During my first year at university I got a loan of 3.200 Deutschmarks (there were no tuition fees yet) and I had to repay only 1.600. I had it actually repaid before I graduated as I was working at the Fraunhofer Institute for Automation from the second year.
Every student studies his primary subject (of which he chooses a specialization after 4 semesters) and a secondary subject from the fifth semester onwards. My primary subject was computer science, specialization in database and compiler design with English studies as secondary subject.

That's the way we do it over here, so if someone would feel like explaining that college malarkey...

[putaro]

I was at lunch a while ago here in Tokyo and overheard a lady from Canada (presumably a teacher) expound on how the United States try to fit a "federal, one-size fits all" educational model across the country. It was all I could do not to fall out of my chair laughing laughing.

So, the US systems vary state by state, at least. Local school districts do have a lot of ability to change things, though I believe that textbooks are usually approved at the state level.

In general, US public education is split into elementary school, middle school/junior high school and high school. Elementary school covers kindergarten (usually optional) through fifth or sixth grade, depending on the school district. Middle school/junior high school will cover sixth or seventh grade through eighth or ninth grade. High school will cover ninth or tenth grade through twelfth grade. When I was in school, San Francisco switched middle school from seventh thru ninth to sixth thru eighth. I was finishing sixth grade when this happened and both the sixth grade class and the fifth grade class graduated to middle school that year.

Public education is free everywhere in the United States, I think. Private schools are allowed as well as at-home schooling. Some areas may have specialized vocational high schools, but in general, most districts have all students together in the same schools with different tracks within the school (e.g. college prep, regular, remedial). San Francisco has a special academic high school (Lowell) that requires a certain GPA to get into from middle school.

High schools may also offer "Advanced Placements" classes that can count towards college credit, such as calculus or advanced history. Usually students in high school receive grades from A-F (4 to 0) with an F being a fail. An "A" in an advanced placement course will usually be counted as a "5" so it's possible to have a GPA (grade point average) of greater than 4.0.

In California, being in school is mandatory through age 18 in theory, but you can either graduate early by passing a test (the GED or General Educational Development tests) after age 16 or you can just drop out and disappear somehow, about the same age.

Usually to get into college/university (you will see them called both and there is little rhyme or reason to it. In fact, some institutions have both! I went to University of California, San Diego which is internally split into six colleges, so technically I attended both a college and a university) you need to take the SAT (Scholastic Achievement Test). Your high school GPA will count as well, but because American high school's tend to vary widely in how difficult they are, the GPA is not a good measure between schools. Actually, even inside of a school, it's possible to be on very different tracks and have GPAs that mean really different things. An "A" in Remedial Math is not the same as an "A" in Advanced Algebra.

Secondary education is a mix of public, private non-profit and private for-profit schools. In California, we have three levels of public secondary education. Community or City Colleges, the California State Universities and the University of California. Community College is cheap or free, offers a 2-year Associates Degree as well as continuing education. SF Community College claims an enrollment of about 100,000 students (SF population is about 800,000) but I think the majority of those are people taking cooking classes (or sex classes - it is SF, after all). Admission requirements for Community College are fairly low, I think to start an Associate degree you just need a high school diploma or GED. Many people go to Community College for their first two years to save money or to catch up and then transfer to a four-year university.

The California State University (San Francisco State University, San Diego State University, et al) system is the mid-range of public secondary education in California. They offer four year (Bachelor) degrees as well as Masters (about 2 years after a bachelors) and PhD's (4+ years). The State Universities are more undergraduate focused than the UC's. Tuition runs about $4000/year. It used to be free or close to it. There are also two Polytechnic Universities attached to the CSU system, which are kind of applied science schools.

The University of California system (UC Berkeley, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego) is the high end of the public universities in California and they have a mandate to educate the top 12.5% of graduating California high school students. UC tuition was free in the past for residents of California, when I went in the mid-late eighties, it was about $900/year, today it is about $13,000/year. UC tends to be more research/theory oriented than the CSU system. UC also has a number of medical schools (medical doctors typically do a four-year undergraduate program then a four-year MD program) and some other oddball attachments like the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (graduate only) and the Hastings Law School. UC also runs a big portion of the US nuclear weapons research, managing the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well.

Many schools are very competitive and sometimes certain majors within the school are hard to get into or require that you get a certain GPA the first two years in order to continue on. When I started at UCSD we were told in orientation that 30% of us would drop out before graduating.

Other states have varying levels of public colleges/universities. I think most have at least a two-tiered system with a community college system and a state university of some kind.

Then, we've got any number of private, non-profit universities and colleges. These include the big names like Harvard, Yale and the other Ivy League universities as well as schools that seem public, like MIT and CalTech. In California, Stanford and USC (University of Southern California) are both private, non-profit universities. We have completely secular, religious affiliated but not terribly religious (e.g. the Jesuit universities, like Georgetown, Notre Dame, University of San Francisco), really religious but general education and then religious education schools. Fees will vary wildly. Harvard is about $38,000 per year, though they often offer some level of financial aid depending on your need (up to a full scholarship). The very top universities in the US are private universities, but you can't say that a private university is automatically better than a public university. US News does a ranking and the top US public university according to them is UC Berkeley, which is ranked #21.

Then, there's the for-profit sector, which tends to be things like technical schools. There are well-established and fairly honest technical schools which will put you through a program to be an electronics tech or an auto mechanic or a hair dresser and then there's a bunch of scams.

Funding for college is a combination of your own/your parents' money, government grants if you can qualify, scholarships, if you can qualify, and student loans.

If there's one the thing the US system has going for it, I'd say it's the ability to get a second chance. We have different tracks in high school, for example, but you have the ability to switch tracks, so getting putting on to the remedial track is not a life sentence. The same for universities. If you want to go on to get a Master's or a PhD, you need to have a bachelor's, but you won't be automatically disqualified if you went to the wrong university for your bachelor's. If you drop out of college, you can pull yourself together and re-apply. There's also a wide range of schools. On the other hand, it has become expensive and it's really starting to burden younger people right out of college. I graduated UC debt free. I'd hate to have gotten out of college with $50K of student loans or more to pay back. We also tend to focus too much on "college" education and not give enough attention to those people who aren't academically inclined but can do extremely well with things like vocational training.

[Kotik]

Wow, thanks for that explanation, putaro. Up to now I thought that the German ed system was complex, but jeez

The thing that sticks out is, that while financially much more accessible (it is practically impossible to rack up more than 10.000 euros of debt for student loans) the German system is much less forgiving. If you drop out of university (or are forced to, because you failed three exams) that's it for that subject. For instance if I had failed - let's say - three math exams at university, I'd have been exmatriculated with no chance of re-applying for computer science in any university in the european union and would I go to study CS in america, it would not be recognized. I would however be allowed to reapply for Philosophy or battle knitting or whatever as long as it isn't CS.

[putaro]

Well, possible doesn't mean it's easy to re-apply. I'm sure you'd have to show how you're really going to do better this time. But a lot of people do go back to school in different ways.

My story is kind of funny - my degree is actually in Psychology/Cognitive Science. When I started at UCSD, the Computer Science program was "impacted" so you had to go into pre-CS and get a high enough GPA so that after two years you would be admitted to the regular CS program. I, being an arrogant little shit, wanted to take the most difficult CS major, which was Computer Engineering, a combination of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, so the pre-requisites for that were the CS courses but also the basic electrical engineering courses, more advanced math than a regular CS major and more advanced physics than a regular CS major. I'm not that good at higher mathematics it turns out, so my GPA wasn't high enough to get into either the Computer Engineering major OR the regular CS major. So, I didn't even need to fail any exams in order to not get to stay in the major.

Fortunately for me, the Cognitive Science (hard psychology/artificial intelligence) program was wide open and let you take all of the CS classes you felt like and instead of higher math, you took psychology classes .

[Kotik]

I, being an arrogant little shit, wanted to take the most difficult CS major

Could we be twins, accidentally separated at birth? I actually started out in the most difficult CS major as well, until I got so fed up with the university's bloody obsession with theory. I changed over to a UAS after the 6th semester. Believe it or not, in the 7th semester I encountered vectors for the first time that were actually populated by numbers. Before that I ground my teeth to the fillings proving vector space homomorphism between vectors that were entirely populated with abstract functions

[putaro]

Before that I ground my teeth to the fillings proving vector space homomorphism between vectors that were entirely populated with abstract functions

I would have definitely flunked that. I gave up around differential equations. My after-school job was more interesting anyway. I got to help design supercomputers and mess with vector processors instead of messing with vector spaces.

[Alelou]

Putaro, a number of colleges in the US are allowing students to waive the SAT, and others allow the ACT instead. They have found that, despite the variations, high school transcripts are a much better predictor of college performance.

Community colleges, of course, take just about anyone. But even with us, if you flunk out big time and don't fix it by re-taking those classes quickly, you're going to have to wait a few years before we'll let you back in, and you may have lost your shot at financial aid. I wish more of my students understood that this is not a high school, and nobody is going to lead them by the hand and make sure they get through it.

The US also has a growing segment of for-profit colleges that exist primarily to milk financial aid dollars from the government, along with some private dollars from students who have little hope of paying back their debt, since their degrees are essentially worthless. I've heard from adjuncts who teach in these places that the institution will indeed pass students who only show up to class once in awhile and don't do any work, or blatantly plagiarize, or whatever.

There are also a bunch of ever-shifting criminal operations across the globe with names that SOUND like colleges that will give anyone a (useless) degree in exchange for a nice chunk of change. That's for the low-rent con men who don't even bother to set up a pretense of an education, but then I don't feel sorry for the people who must know they are cheating when they spend their money on fake credentials or places that promise they can graduate in 15 days. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/wo ... rees_x.htm

[Kotik]

That's for the low-rent con men who don't even bother to set up a pretense of an education, but then I don't feel sorry for the people who must know they are cheating when they spend their money on fake credentials or places that promise they can graduate in 15 days. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/wo ... rees_x.htm

Well, we have those in Europe, too. You can "apply" to some shady Romanian "university" and buy yourself a degree. But thankfully no HR manager with half a brain over here hires someone, who comes along with a PhD in battle knitting and advanced Pixie-dust design from the University of Applied Esoterics in Timisoara.

[Alelou]

Actually, a lot of these fake degrees sold here claim to be from universities in Europe, the UK, or Australia.

It came up in one of the colleges where I teach because someone had actually applied for a position using one of these fake degrees. They also offer fake transcripts -- that's one thing you always have to get sent to a college when they hire you. The person screening the applicant did a little research trying to figure out what the deal was and was stunned at how many fake college names are out there. She circulated the list as a heads up.

[Kotik]

oooh, I've always wanted to correct a teacher

Dear Alelou, you write "universities in Europe, the UK, or Australia."

Erm, the UK are like part of Europe, y'know


I've corrected a teacher

(just had to take the mickey. Sorry ma'am )

[Alelou]

Yes, yes, Kotik, just as Mexico and Canada are part of America. Funny how they don't get called Americans.

Okay, people in the UK, tell us if you think you're really part of Europe.

At any rate, I'm sure they're extremely grateful they DIDN'T adopt the European currency.

[Kotik]

Yes, yes, Kotik, just as Mexico and Canada are part of America.

Erm, as are Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala... etc. We have actually four different terms for Americans over here:

Americans= People of the US Of A
North Americans=Americans+Her majesty's subjects from Canadaland
Central Americans=Mexico, Nicaragua etc.
South Americans=what it says on the tin

I always have to smile when things are referred to as "southern american" and the author means the southern US states. I always feel like asking back: "And what are the Brazilians?"

The UK are part of Europe, heck, they are even members of the European Union. But conservative Brits tend to make the distinction between 'us' and 'the continent'. On the other hand they call the US of A 'the colonies', so I'm not sure they're awfully representative

[Alelou]

Yes, I have heard of Central and South America, shockingly enough.

My family in Scotland cannot be described as conservative, and I'm quite sure when they say Europe, they don't think of Scotland as truly belonging to it except in geographical terms. At least one of my cousins lives practically half his life in Romania, though, so I suppose that family member may feel a bit more "European." Of course, in Scotland you also have that whole Scottish vs. British thing going, just to add another layer of separate identity.

I was struck my how many Europeans were working in Britain during this last visit, especially in the hotels and restaurants. The UK felt much more cosmopolitan to me than it used to be, although since I also couldn't afford to sample hotels and restaurants when I lived there in the early 80's, I may not be the best judge.

[Kotik]

I was struck my how many Europeans were working in Britain during this last visit, especially in the hotels and restaurants. The UK felt much more cosmopolitan to me than it used to be, although since I also couldn't afford to sample hotels and restaurants when I lived there in the early 80's, I may not be the best judge.

There are a lot of Poles working in Britain. That comes from WWII times, when many poles found Exile on her majesty's island. After the revolution in 1989/90 the poles left home by the truckloads and the primary destinations were Britain and Germany. We observe a funny phenomenon every year. My step-father runs a towing service and is contracted to care for 30 miles of the A2 motorway, the primary East-west axis of Germany. Whenever there is a major catholic holiday, the motorway is chock-full of cars with British license plates - thousands of expat poles on the way back to Poland for the celebrations.

There's also a sizeable amount of people from Latvia and Lithuania in Britain.

[Alelou]

Of course none of this explains my favorite new addition to London: Korean restaurants. Yum, yum, yum! Though I suppose that I might just not have noticed. I think twice in Britain I went out with my fellow students for a meal. Once it was a Chinese restaurant, and I still remember loving crab corn soup (which is oddly enough never on the menu of Chinese restaurants in this country).

Generally I contented myself with bread or muesli and a bag of apples or carrots, and once in awhile I'd splurge on some French cheese or a bag of prawns or a filet of fish or something. I had no money to spare, and I was also on a weird-ass diet (Pritikin) at the time.