It's really kind of sad. It makes me glad we live over here right now. My daughter and I have talked about the education systems in both the US and here extensively, and I don't think she'd be able to do nearly as much in the US. For one, high schools here are divided by how well you learn. She was at the highest level and they went SO much more in depth than we ever did. Like, she had 5 years of biology where I only had one. She had 5 years of physics, 4 years of chemistry. They learned so much more than we did. And she had something like 16 subjects in her third year and like 10 for every year beyond that. They get a much more extensive education, and there's no competition at all. No GPAs, no college entrance exams like ACT or SAT. You don't have to apply to a school and wait to see if you get accepted. You choose a major that the school offers, and as long as you took the required classes in high school, you're in, unless you are wanting to be a doctor. Then there are waitlists. But for most things, you just sign up. Every student pays the same amount, no matter where they go to school and what they study and the government pays for a lot of it. E's tuition and fees are just over 2000 for this year, and some of that was paid by the govenment. She's at one of the best research universities in the world, I think....they are always putting people from her university in the news because of something they are studying and developing. So I know she's getting probably a better education than she could get in the US, for so much less money. There's no doubt in my mind that had we lived in the states, she could have gotten into an ivy league school. She graduated in the top 5% of students nationwide, and one of her classmates who only got very average grades took the ACT to go to a school in Texas, and she scored a 28 on it as a foreign student. I'm sure E would have gotten over 30 had she chosen to take it, but we would never have been able to afford an ivy league education even if she had wanted to study in the US. I'm sure she could have gotten in, but the cost of even a standard college education in the US is multiple times more expensive than it is here. You HAVE to get scholarships and it's so competitive!!
It just makes me wonder why we do things the way we do in the US. It seems so inefficient. So many kids have no idea what they want to study and they waste time and money taking classes that they don't really need, biding time until they pick a major and can take classes related to that. And there's so much pressure to go to college, or to a 4 year institution when not everyone NEEDS that. When I graduated, most of my classmates went on to at least junior colleges, and I don't think I could name a single person other than myself who actually got a degree. I picked up one scholarship in the middle of my first year because someone flunked out. I graduated number 2 in my class and the other top 4 students all flunked out or dropped out....well, I guess technically, at least one, maybe 2 of them had to quit because they were in jail. And one of those had a tuition and fees scholarship. The amount of money that was wasted on all those people who never finished....think what could have been done with all that money if students had the resources and the guidance to make a better career choice that was more suited to them. E's school made every student do this months-long process of choosing which classes they wanted to do from 4th year on, after having taken every option for a couple of years so they could see what they were good at and what they liked. They got advice from teachers about whether they could handle that subject in the upper years. Then they were required to go to career fairs and they brought in former students to talk about their schools and their majors, so kids knew what the options were. All the stuff that we had to find out for ourselves was all provided by the school here. That's how E picked her school and her major. Some guy came in to talk about Bio-technology at Wageningen, and she thought it sounded really interesting, so she signed up for a "walk along day" where they toured the Bio-tech and molecular life sciences facilities and talked to students, etc. She fell in love with the molecular life sciences department and the campus, and that was it. Maybe it's different in Wyoming than in big cities, but we never had anyone coming in to talk to us about specific career opportunities. Recruiters only talked to you if you were a star athlete or a stellar scholar. My brother was called by a recruiter from Cornell, but no one ever called to talk to me either for my music or any other reason, even though I was one of the top students in my class, I had been chosen for All-state 3 years out of 4 (I was disqualified one year because they sent us the wrong audition material and we weren't told until the day before auditions when it was too late to learn the right stuff), and I did really well in speech and debate. Not every kid in the US is given the same opportunities. So much depends on where you live and what's offered there. I like that everyone is on a level playing field here. You just pick what you want and do it. And there are a few schools here that have English programs with a lot of foreign students. I'm not sure what Tuition looks like for non-Dutch students though. But at the rate we're going, they might easily pick off some of the most promising US students for top programs because it's easier to get into and it's cheaper. It would be really sad to lose all that talent to foreign markets.
Let me know if you ever put it on Substack.
I watched a clip on YouTube where her "younger, more perfect version" emerged from Demi Moore's spine. NOPE!