The lines about Harvard having "outreach" programs is entirely out of touch. The problem is money. It's always money. In the U.S. we simply don't care about education. It's expensive, time consuming, and heavily unoptimized. Only those with a support system (of money) can accomplish a degree at even the most affordable universities.
Scholarships do not exist in tech. The largest tech companies give out the fewest, and they are heavily competed for. Microsoft chooses 4 women a year. Less than 0.1% of students will ever receive any sizeable scholarship, and have to depend on private loans ontop of government student loans.
Scholarships are designed against low income students. They depend on good recommendations from teachers, long perfectly written essays, and all manner of ridiculous extra requirements. People in city schools of thousands of students rarely, if ever, can get a legitimate recommendation. Students can rarely even stay after school because their parents can't afford to pick them up later. Meaning they can't participate in after school extra curriculars.
I know of multiple women that are going to drop their freshmen degree in CS because of this. Cant afford it. No support network. Nobody cares. Kind of hard to focus on studies when you have to work to even exist at a university if your parents aren't paying for it.
As a society, we do a shit job of ensuring everybody has access to quality education. Its starts young - poor school districts struggle to provide the services they were created to provide. Hell, even relatively wealthy school districts tend to be overcrowded, with faltering infrastructure, and are prone to leaving children behind.
This continues into post-secondary, where you need money, and lots of it, to get a degree. Sure, the flagship schools are some of the best int he world. But, take VA's flagship state schools... they average nearly $20k/year for tuition alone. And given their locations (UVA - Charlottesville, W&M - Williamsburg, VT - Blacksburg) the vast majority of students will also be paying full room & board, driving costs beyond $30k/year.
And that's just the flagship schools - there are a whole host of mediocre colleges that charge the same or more. And then there's the for-profit schools that are a case study on their own.
> As a society, we do a shit job of ensuring everybody has access to quality education.
Is there any society that does a good job with that ?
The US richly rewards education in the most important aspect - great salaries for the jobs that come after the education. Almost no countries compete with US salaries. For the best tech salaries, it's fair to say none do.
in California and New York. Salaries across the U.S. in tech jobs are far less outside of the bubble economies.
Salaries have nothing to do with education costs. There is no causal relationship. We can both fund education and have high salaries in those bubble economies. Infact the high salaries means we would have an easier time doing so, if only we taxed mega corporations.
The point of my post is that many cannot even get the funds necessary to attend a university. They cannot "just focus" on school. You have to work to afford living costs at a bare minimum.
I'd add that maybe some people have been educated well enough that they realize there is more to life than working all the time. In addition to the fact that most kids generally act like their parents do.
Yes, the US rewards those that manage to get an education. Where we fail is ensuring everybody who wants a top-quality education has access. At the post-secondary level, it's largely a money problem - school is just too expensive. And whole scholarships and other funding sources do exist, a student needs a lot of guidance on obtaining that money.
It’s just outside it in QS, but anyway… isn’t that a little bit of a weak praise? Their universities don’t compete with others in Europe, let alone the US. It’s definitely not access to top education is it?
I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. Harvard pre-dates our current primary/secondary education system. And it accepts only a tiny fraction of college-bound students, who are themselves a small fraction of the populace. It's one of the wealthiest, oldest, and most renowned universities in the world - it is almost completely divorced from broader educational system in the US.
Nobody is denying the US has excellent post-secondary institutions. My response was to your assertion that the existence of excellent universities proves the US cares about education.
The US excels at educating our wealthy elite, largely through access to zip-code restricted public schools or expensive private prep academies, which then grants access to institutions like Harvard, other Ivies and equivalent schools, and the flagship public state schools. We don't do so well at ensuring a baseline understanding of the world to the populace in general.
Sure. Also, Bezos and Musk live in the U.S. That doesn't mean everyone is rich or that even the median has a standard of living comparable to many other first world countries.
Scholarships do not exist in tech. The largest tech companies give out the fewest, and they are heavily competed for. Microsoft chooses 4 women a year. Less than 0.1% of students will ever receive any sizeable scholarship, and have to depend on private loans ontop of government student loans.
Scholarships are designed against low income students. They depend on good recommendations from teachers, long perfectly written essays, and all manner of ridiculous extra requirements. People in city schools of thousands of students rarely, if ever, can get a legitimate recommendation. Students can rarely even stay after school because their parents can't afford to pick them up later. Meaning they can't participate in after school extra curriculars.
I know of multiple women that are going to drop their freshmen degree in CS because of this. Cant afford it. No support network. Nobody cares. Kind of hard to focus on studies when you have to work to even exist at a university if your parents aren't paying for it.