Timeline for Why are most of the top universities American?
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18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 11, 2015 at 0:04 | comment | added | Massimo Ortolano | @DavidRicherby Yes, we are considered officials or civil servants (I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know which translation fits better). | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 22:17 | comment | added | David Richerby | @MassimoOrtolano " to obtain a permanent position in an Italian university you have to obtain the Italian citizenship before applying" Um. How is that legal? (Or are permanent employees of universities considered civil servants, for which I believe there's an exception.) | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:54 | comment | added | Massimo Ortolano | John, for what concerns Italy, not really, in general. However, to obtain a permanent position in an Italian university you have to obtain the Italian citizenship before applying. This can actually be discouraging for a non-EU citizen, like a foreigner PhD student, who wish to find a university position in Italy. | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:49 | comment | added | John Perry | As for the graph, you misunderstand what I'm saying. What the OECD report I linked to states is that, historically, the US has sent a higher proportion of its population through universities. This has obvious consequences for the amount of money in the system, and consequent potential on quality of education. Both the OECD report and your graph also say that currently others do better. The caption on this BBC story's table makes the same data clear: bbc.com/news/education-11203790 Note it says, "Percentage of young people who are first-time graduates from university, 2008." | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:39 | comment | added | John Perry | David, I'm willing to admit I'm wrong on the EU employment thing. I was distinctly told that employment rules in the EU make it very hard for non-Italians (for example) to find jobs in Italy, and not just for reasons of language. | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:36 | comment | added | David Richerby | Re the BBC article I linked, the caption says, "Estimated percentages of 2008 age cohort which will complete first-time academic degrees, out of 26 OECD countries, plus Australia figure for 2007." In other words, it's graduation rates expressed over the whole age group population, not just the fraction going to university. It's saying that 37% of Americans go to university and get a degree (compared to sixty-something percent of Finns), not that only 37% of American undergrads pass their course! | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:22 | comment | added | Mico | @Raphael - You ask, "would a non-English-speaking person get any job [at a US-based university]"? Well, probably not if they're completely illiterate. However, as long as they can write in English reasonably well and thus have the potential to write research papers that will be read by their peers, their spoken English is usually of negligible importance at many top-flight US-based research-oriented institutions. | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:20 | comment | added | David Richerby | @JohnPerry Freedom of EU citizens to work anywhere in the EU dates back to the Treaty of Rome (1957). It was already present in a restricted form in the EU's predecessor form, the European Steel and Coal Community, which gave freedom of movement to workers in those two sectors from 1951 (though, at that time, the signatories were just Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany). | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:11 | comment | added | ssmart | Germany has both a university system and a very substantial research institute system (see the Max Planck and Frauenhofer societies). Certainly in the institutes I have visited, the vast majority of the research staff are foreign (and probably don't speak German). The researchers are also largely post-docs, with a spattering of PhD students (and no undergraduates at all, except those on the odd summer research project). The university roles have a much larger teaching component, and are much less well funded, which changes the game somewhat. | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 10:02 | comment | added | Raphael | In Germany, many if not most undergrad programs are taught in German. Since usually every university professor has to teach undergrad courses (with few exceptions), you have to speak German in order to be employed. I can't imagine that that is different in the US; would a non-English-speaking person get any job? | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 9:56 | comment | added | John Perry | Finally, I don't quite buy the argument about English, since the universities I visited generally had quite a lot of English-language labor and education. That said, how long has the automatic right to work in any EU country been in place? I was referring to historical issues; i.e., 20-30 years ago or more. | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 9:55 | comment | added | John Perry | As for funding, I should have been more careful in my language, but (for instance) the funding regimes really are different. I was on sabbatical in Europe last year, and I was told that, historically, European agencies have tried to award many small grants, while American agencies typically prefer a few large grants. The person I spoke with was unhappy that the Europeans were changing to imitate the US. Here is a complaint from Bertrand Meyer (not whom I spoke to) that Europeans are changing their criteria to "breakthrough" results, in imitation of NSF. bertrandmeyer.com/tag/darwin | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 9:50 | comment | added | John Perry | David, that's a chart of graduation rates. Contrast that to the OECD's statement, "Only Canada (51%), Israel (46%), Japan (45%) and the Russian Federation (54%) have higher tertiary attainment levels among [25-64 year olds]." oecd.org/edu/CN%20-%20United%20States.pdf | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 9:32 | comment | added | David Richerby | And if you look at the graph at the end of this BBC article, you see that, in 2010, the USA was actually slightly below the OECD average of proportion of people who get a university degree. In summary, all three of your points are suspect. | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 9:28 | comment | added | David Richerby | Also, research funding in the UK and Canada is competitive. The European Union has extensive competitive research funding programmes. | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 8:44 | comment | added | David Richerby | Your comparison of US versus European labo(u)r law is off the mark. In both cases, you can't employ somebody from outside the bloc (US or EU) unless you can argue that they're better than everyone inside it, which isn't hard in academia since everyone has unique skills. And EU citizens have the automatic right to work in any EU country. A far more significant effect is that English is widely taught as a second language throughout the world and is the lingua franca of academia. Wanna work in the US? Your English is probably OK. Wanna work in Italy? Bulgaria? | |
| Oct 10, 2015 at 0:21 | review | First posts | |||
| Oct 10, 2015 at 1:01 | |||||
| Oct 10, 2015 at 0:21 | history | answered | John Perry | CC BY-SA 3.0 |