Comment by s1artibartfast
4 days ago
Good question. I wonder if labor competition in Europe is less reliant on University names and reputation? IT could also have to do with cultural difference is what students look for in a university.
My understanding is that most universities in Europe look more like US bare bones commuter schools, opposed to an all inclusive recreational experience.
The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
Oxford doesn't pay staff well unless you are in the top of the pyramid, i.e. a professor. Paradoxically those tend to contribute less to education. Senior postdocs and fellows do a significant amount of teaching but their salaries are incredibly low. You need to make lots of life compromises to be able to sustain yourself at one of those. For example, fellows teaching at different colleges often get stipends and salaries in the range of £30-35,000 per year. Keep in mind that those fellowships require a PhD and a stellar CV.
Most other British and EU universities suffer from the same issues. For more information, see this article at The Guardian, which generated lots of debate: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/no.... In a nutshell the article states that "[...] I no longer believe that early-career positions at Oxbridge universities are viable for individuals without independent financial means." Also "[...] the median non-professorial academic salary at Oxbridge is £45,000."
MIT is a huge outlier in terms of R&D and the population it selects students from, it would be more fair to compare Oxford to Harvard. Oxford...really is about as far from commuter schools than you can get, for example having to wear robes to the dining hall...that is straight out of Harry Potter (and indeed, where they filmed the dining scene at one of the colleges).
I think most R&D at MIT is paid for by gov't science research grants.
>The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors and staff getting paid compared to the ones at MIT (which is Boston, which is a very high cost-of-living city for the US)?
I found this on Google:
And:
The average at Oxford is much higher than MIT. Note: GBP to USD is currently 1.27
According to the sister comment to mine, Oxford pays only professors well, and everyone else quite poorly. There's a lot more to a university's staff than just the professors.
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Im not sure what you mean by maybe not. If oxford is cutting corners, it still has the top rank in Europe, so I suppose they are the correct corners to cut.
Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
>Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything.
It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it means the US is just too damn expensive.
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