"This is a significant difference from America where every middle class parent seems to be agonizing over their kid’s prospects for getting into the right college."
What is true is that the very wealthy, and the media class, agonize over these things, and so they make it into the media.
Readers also love stories of status, striving, and competition, so the stories of exclusionary schools get a lot of attention.
The noisiest group as measured by media attention isn't necessarily representative of the whole, any more than girls who make a lot of money on OnlyFans are representative of all girls.
For one, a comparison with the whole University of California system is not really comparable. Your point about relative size of public vs. private universities still stands, but you have to look at individual campuses, which also have hierarchies, inside the state and for out-of-state students too, whom the elite state universities court (subject to legal requirements because they're state universities) because the pay much higher tuition. But the large state university campuses do have a ton of undergraduates anyway, on the order of 10s of thousands (20K, 50K), rather than just thousands.
If you ask someone informally, at least in some quarters, there is an internal hierarchy of subjects; (I've even seen graphics of hierarchies WITHIN engineering, with physics at the top of course, haha). Your prospects are more limited with humanities and soft-science degrees relative to technical degrees, even from elite institutions; but it's true, it's definitely less acute then.
The low status of soft sciences is a problem everywhere. Ironically the problem is, in fact, that the softer sciences are *more* difficult, not less.
My wife and I both went through the American educational system, suffering through high school where we were bullied by peers and sexually harassed by teachers. Then, in order to save money, we enrolled in junior college. American junior college sounds much like Swedish university - it's open to everyone, it's cheap, and they bend over backwards to provide financial aid to as many students as they can. The downside is that the campus was dotted by crowds of dysfunctional loafers who had no academic potential and knew it - wise students avoided them. But the upside of junior college was that the teachers were there to teach and *only* to teach. We had many of our best classes there.
After that we were able to transfer to university for our upper level coursework. There are virtually no restrictions on successful students transferring from junior colleges into universities since they can easily evaluate your prospects by your undergraduate coursework. I'm not sure why everyone doesn't do this, because we both loved junior college, and university was less satisfying. I we both earned our bachelor's degrees in physics, and the experience there was much less cozy; my wife in particular had poor experiences with professors who had better things to do than teach their classes. After that she settled down to have babies and, after a few years in the workforce, I bit the bullet and I went on to take my master's in physics in a respectable but thoroughly unprestigious school.
The first year of my master's program was grueling. I was able to get my tuition fees waived by agreeing to teach classes while I taught. But it had been a long time for me, and I could scarcely take a derivative. But after that, earning master's degree was the most enlightening experience of my life, and I wish I had known in 5th grade that all the nonsense they were trying to teach me would go away eventually, and everything would be just fine, once I completed my undergraduate coursework in physics. I'm occasionally tempted to return for a PhD, but the master's was a strain on my family, and I have too many obligations now.
But I mentioned that the soft sciences are harder - they are. In the hard sciences it's possible, at least in principle, if not as often in practice, to isolate phenomena and make clean observations uncluttered by noise. When English speakers say they have something "down to a science," they use that expression because in fields like physics, you can accurately predict the fraction of molecules traveling above a certain speed at a given temperature, or the flight path of a projectile, with startling precision.
The social sciences, by contrast, are extremely messy. Intelligence was very easy to measure even early on, and around the turn of the century Ashton and Lee have done a pretty good job mapping out personality, but researchers like Inglehart and Hofstede are still working out the sociological equivalent of a periodic table for human cultures, and economics is a sorry mess. The fact that the very best thinkers are drawn into the hard sciences makes the situation even worse; the English-speaking world is not likely to see another Hans Eysenck again. If the United States had any sense at all, it would immediately put its very brightest minds into soft sciences in a desperate effort to salvage what it can. Still, the lack of effort in the soft sciences does create a void for independent thinkers to make discoveries on their own - and for some, discovery its own reward.
Interesting! Then we know that the study-something-difficult strategy is alive and well in America too.
One problem with the soft sciences is that they attract few bright minds. The other, probably bigger, problem is that few people actually want to make progress there. Most people at least in theory want humanity to win more ground in the hard sciences. But since the soft sciences are related to political standpoints, I think most people prefer not to know too much about the social world.
Yes, more or less. I do think there's two other things, though, at least in the United States. The first problem is that most people are rather incurious about things in general, but they see obvious value in technology, construction, medicine, entertainment, and finance. They will study problems to apply obvious solutions to tangible problems, but studying things like human happiness or group affiliation just rings oddly; those aren't things that can be seen and touched.
The second problem is that when Americans become interested in issues related to the soft sciences, they will find tired answers to their questions either in religion, or in emotionally motivated status quo moralizing which inevitably solves problems in the social world by talking more, by caring more, and above all by boundless optimism in the transformative power of an inspiring reform. The field of education is especially guilty here, with the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act legislating success out of thin air, until it was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, after which point even in Sweden you could not have failed to notice the meteoric improvement in American academic prowess. But if you didn't, don't worry! The American Students Are All Super Geniuses Act is just around the corner; *then* you'll see we really mean business here in the States.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, that was funny. I felt the need to check that it wasn't just a joke.
In general I hold the prejudice that American society tries to fix social problems with laws. In Scandinavia the typical reaction is to throw a heap of public money on everything that needs to be fixed. In America, where there is less public money to spend, the typical reaction instead seems to be to write a law about what people are allowed to do and not.
I mentioned how the soft sciences struggle, and we're really not very good yet at measuring sociocultural variables. Still, there are rough ways to measure militarism - defense spending per capita, ownership of nuclear weapons, overall military employment, willingness to fight for the country, and so on. By all imaginable measures, the United States is a very militaristic country.
In light of that, it's interesting to compare American history with the history of other Anglophone nations, like Australia. Very quickly the Americans began to agitate against the British, throwing their tea into the harbor and shooting them; the Australians just made do. Now fast forward two hundred years and a dozen wars later, and it's hard to see how either country is any more independent of England than the other. But never mind that, at least here in America we have a clearly worded Declaration of Independence and a nice Constitution enshrining all sorts of rights like free speech which we really, really care about (except when it's inconvenient).
1. Linköping University would like to have a word with you, as well. :)
2. I don't think that all anthropology is low status here. But you have to be doing physical anthropology; and it helps if you are digging up ruins and the like. Sitting around, writing and talking about culture doesn't cut it.
2. That is possible! But I could never apply for courses in physical anthropology because I didn't know the discipline existed until about ten years after I quit university. I have still never heard the word in Swedish. But yes, it obviously exists:
I especially enjoyed the manly touch of this article.
"This is a significant difference from America where every middle class parent seems to be agonizing over their kid’s prospects for getting into the right college."
"Agonizing" is very uncommon and something like 3% of students attend highly competitive schools, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/09/a-majority-of-u-s-colleges-admit-most-students-who-apply/
What is true is that the very wealthy, and the media class, agonize over these things, and so they make it into the media.
Readers also love stories of status, striving, and competition, so the stories of exclusionary schools get a lot of attention.
The noisiest group as measured by media attention isn't necessarily representative of the whole, any more than girls who make a lot of money on OnlyFans are representative of all girls.
A couple of comments!
For one, a comparison with the whole University of California system is not really comparable. Your point about relative size of public vs. private universities still stands, but you have to look at individual campuses, which also have hierarchies, inside the state and for out-of-state students too, whom the elite state universities court (subject to legal requirements because they're state universities) because the pay much higher tuition. But the large state university campuses do have a ton of undergraduates anyway, on the order of 10s of thousands (20K, 50K), rather than just thousands.
If you ask someone informally, at least in some quarters, there is an internal hierarchy of subjects; (I've even seen graphics of hierarchies WITHIN engineering, with physics at the top of course, haha). Your prospects are more limited with humanities and soft-science degrees relative to technical degrees, even from elite institutions; but it's true, it's definitely less acute then.
The low status of soft sciences is a problem everywhere. Ironically the problem is, in fact, that the softer sciences are *more* difficult, not less.
My wife and I both went through the American educational system, suffering through high school where we were bullied by peers and sexually harassed by teachers. Then, in order to save money, we enrolled in junior college. American junior college sounds much like Swedish university - it's open to everyone, it's cheap, and they bend over backwards to provide financial aid to as many students as they can. The downside is that the campus was dotted by crowds of dysfunctional loafers who had no academic potential and knew it - wise students avoided them. But the upside of junior college was that the teachers were there to teach and *only* to teach. We had many of our best classes there.
After that we were able to transfer to university for our upper level coursework. There are virtually no restrictions on successful students transferring from junior colleges into universities since they can easily evaluate your prospects by your undergraduate coursework. I'm not sure why everyone doesn't do this, because we both loved junior college, and university was less satisfying. I we both earned our bachelor's degrees in physics, and the experience there was much less cozy; my wife in particular had poor experiences with professors who had better things to do than teach their classes. After that she settled down to have babies and, after a few years in the workforce, I bit the bullet and I went on to take my master's in physics in a respectable but thoroughly unprestigious school.
The first year of my master's program was grueling. I was able to get my tuition fees waived by agreeing to teach classes while I taught. But it had been a long time for me, and I could scarcely take a derivative. But after that, earning master's degree was the most enlightening experience of my life, and I wish I had known in 5th grade that all the nonsense they were trying to teach me would go away eventually, and everything would be just fine, once I completed my undergraduate coursework in physics. I'm occasionally tempted to return for a PhD, but the master's was a strain on my family, and I have too many obligations now.
But I mentioned that the soft sciences are harder - they are. In the hard sciences it's possible, at least in principle, if not as often in practice, to isolate phenomena and make clean observations uncluttered by noise. When English speakers say they have something "down to a science," they use that expression because in fields like physics, you can accurately predict the fraction of molecules traveling above a certain speed at a given temperature, or the flight path of a projectile, with startling precision.
The social sciences, by contrast, are extremely messy. Intelligence was very easy to measure even early on, and around the turn of the century Ashton and Lee have done a pretty good job mapping out personality, but researchers like Inglehart and Hofstede are still working out the sociological equivalent of a periodic table for human cultures, and economics is a sorry mess. The fact that the very best thinkers are drawn into the hard sciences makes the situation even worse; the English-speaking world is not likely to see another Hans Eysenck again. If the United States had any sense at all, it would immediately put its very brightest minds into soft sciences in a desperate effort to salvage what it can. Still, the lack of effort in the soft sciences does create a void for independent thinkers to make discoveries on their own - and for some, discovery its own reward.
Interesting! Then we know that the study-something-difficult strategy is alive and well in America too.
One problem with the soft sciences is that they attract few bright minds. The other, probably bigger, problem is that few people actually want to make progress there. Most people at least in theory want humanity to win more ground in the hard sciences. But since the soft sciences are related to political standpoints, I think most people prefer not to know too much about the social world.
Yes, more or less. I do think there's two other things, though, at least in the United States. The first problem is that most people are rather incurious about things in general, but they see obvious value in technology, construction, medicine, entertainment, and finance. They will study problems to apply obvious solutions to tangible problems, but studying things like human happiness or group affiliation just rings oddly; those aren't things that can be seen and touched.
The second problem is that when Americans become interested in issues related to the soft sciences, they will find tired answers to their questions either in religion, or in emotionally motivated status quo moralizing which inevitably solves problems in the social world by talking more, by caring more, and above all by boundless optimism in the transformative power of an inspiring reform. The field of education is especially guilty here, with the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act legislating success out of thin air, until it was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, after which point even in Sweden you could not have failed to notice the meteoric improvement in American academic prowess. But if you didn't, don't worry! The American Students Are All Super Geniuses Act is just around the corner; *then* you'll see we really mean business here in the States.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, that was funny. I felt the need to check that it wasn't just a joke.
In general I hold the prejudice that American society tries to fix social problems with laws. In Scandinavia the typical reaction is to throw a heap of public money on everything that needs to be fixed. In America, where there is less public money to spend, the typical reaction instead seems to be to write a law about what people are allowed to do and not.
Yes, exactly! Well that, and of course to declare war on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncLOEqc9Rw
I mentioned how the soft sciences struggle, and we're really not very good yet at measuring sociocultural variables. Still, there are rough ways to measure militarism - defense spending per capita, ownership of nuclear weapons, overall military employment, willingness to fight for the country, and so on. By all imaginable measures, the United States is a very militaristic country.
In light of that, it's interesting to compare American history with the history of other Anglophone nations, like Australia. Very quickly the Americans began to agitate against the British, throwing their tea into the harbor and shooting them; the Australians just made do. Now fast forward two hundred years and a dozen wars later, and it's hard to see how either country is any more independent of England than the other. But never mind that, at least here in America we have a clearly worded Declaration of Independence and a nice Constitution enshrining all sorts of rights like free speech which we really, really care about (except when it's inconvenient).
1. Linköping University would like to have a word with you, as well. :)
2. I don't think that all anthropology is low status here. But you have to be doing physical anthropology; and it helps if you are digging up ruins and the like. Sitting around, writing and talking about culture doesn't cut it.
2. That is possible! But I could never apply for courses in physical anthropology because I didn't know the discipline existed until about ten years after I quit university. I have still never heard the word in Swedish. But yes, it obviously exists:
https://www.opulens.se/underskruvat/fysisk-antropologi/