The provided link was fun to read (as a German). Personal highlights:
> German employers simply don't know what to make of an Art History major who wants to take a temporary job in an accounting firm before going on to medical school.
I'm still laughing.
I guess actually nobody knows what to make of an Art History major in the first place. That's one of the typical things one would study if your only plan in live is to become "a wife" (OK, today maybe also "a husband"), or when you have absolutely no clue what you want to do and need additional time to orientate.
Also nobody would hire an Art History major to do an accounting job. Never ever!
That's just ridiculous. You need professional training in accounting if you like to do accounting.
And going to medical school after getting an Art History major? Alone the idea is even more ridiculous than the idea that you could do an accounting job with an Art History major… You need almost teen years to become a full medic. Also getting into some of these universities require that you stand in line for quite some time, and have absolute top grades form school. The people that consider going for Art History study aren't the ones that would have any realistic chance to ever attend (a German) medical university.
So alone that sentence above is actually a kind of joke. But that's not everything funny in there.
> They may neither know what the Ivy League is nor know which university is more prestigious than another.
> In Germany, where you went to school is largely irrelevant.
Jop. And that's a big advantage!
Maybe not out of the perspective of some Dartmouth scholars, but most people on this planet agree that the anglo-saxon system for higher education is just complete madness.
The whole Bologna Process BS (which is modeled by the anglo-saxon madness) significantly decreased the quality of German's higher education, and at the same time almost invalidated the achievement of possessing an university diploma. Now everybody can get some "Art History Bachelor" degree, or some crap like that…
I strongly hope that we'll stop that madness at some point before our education finally hits the lows of the anglo-saxon equivalent!
There was a time that a German "Dipl.-Ing." or "Dr." title had some meaning. What you get nowadays with most "master" students are people that would miserably fail at "Vordiplom"… Also, "everybody" and his dog has a "bachelor degree" which makes it actually useless (and made just "regular school" out of university).
Amusingly enough, my German-as-a-foreign-language teacher had a degree in Art History and made great use of it. Of course, the relevant part for her resume was that she had a Art History degree from a German university conducted in German as a US-native. It demonstrated a much higher degree of language proficiency than the average foreign-language teacher at a high school in the US and gave her classes a unique twist.
The US (although not the UK) college system values taking multiple paths early on, especially for MDs and JDs, so an Art History major isn't completely absurd. At the university I went to, pre-med was a list of classes, but you couldn't select it as a major. Most students would major in something related, like biology, to maximize the overlap in classes, but a Classics major (with a heavy focus on learning Greek and Latin to help with medical terms) was considered a rare but very viable option.
That said, I think the greatest strength of the German education system is its trade schools. The US trade school system is much more ad hoc. Most jobs/problems don't need the heavy theory of a graduate degree, and honestly I think both the US and Germany could use fewer PhDs and more people with practical skills.
This makes no sense. If anything, "anglosaxon" countries are much less obsessed about prestigious schools than places like say, France. So to portray it as a uniquely anglosaxon trait doesn't make sense.
Also, german higher education is meh at best. Even beyond rankings, german universities are usually well in the middle of pack at best, in almost every quantifiable metric. Though putting the blame on the anglos for that is... very typically german I guess.
> Though putting the blame on the anglos for that is... very typically german I guess.
I'm not putting blame on anybody. (I wouldn't be here, or wouldn't have even learned the language if I wouldn't enjoy being with the "anglo people" as such ;-)).
I've said that the standards were undoubtedly much higher before the "Bologna Process", which adapted the German system in most parts to the anglo-saxon model, for net negative gains, imho.
> I strongly hope that we'll stop that madness at some point before our education finally hits the lows of the anglo-saxon equivalent!
Don't British and US universities significantly outperform German universities according to most rankings? I think there's just one Germany institution in the QS top 50 and it's... 50th.
> German employers simply don't know what to make of an Art History major who wants to take a temporary job in an accounting firm before going on to medical school.
I'm still laughing.
I guess actually nobody knows what to make of an Art History major in the first place. That's one of the typical things one would study if your only plan in live is to become "a wife" (OK, today maybe also "a husband"), or when you have absolutely no clue what you want to do and need additional time to orientate.
Also nobody would hire an Art History major to do an accounting job. Never ever!
That's just ridiculous. You need professional training in accounting if you like to do accounting.
And going to medical school after getting an Art History major? Alone the idea is even more ridiculous than the idea that you could do an accounting job with an Art History major… You need almost teen years to become a full medic. Also getting into some of these universities require that you stand in line for quite some time, and have absolute top grades form school. The people that consider going for Art History study aren't the ones that would have any realistic chance to ever attend (a German) medical university.
So alone that sentence above is actually a kind of joke. But that's not everything funny in there.
> They may neither know what the Ivy League is nor know which university is more prestigious than another.
> In Germany, where you went to school is largely irrelevant.
Jop. And that's a big advantage!
Maybe not out of the perspective of some Dartmouth scholars, but most people on this planet agree that the anglo-saxon system for higher education is just complete madness.
The whole Bologna Process BS (which is modeled by the anglo-saxon madness) significantly decreased the quality of German's higher education, and at the same time almost invalidated the achievement of possessing an university diploma. Now everybody can get some "Art History Bachelor" degree, or some crap like that…
I strongly hope that we'll stop that madness at some point before our education finally hits the lows of the anglo-saxon equivalent!
There was a time that a German "Dipl.-Ing." or "Dr." title had some meaning. What you get nowadays with most "master" students are people that would miserably fail at "Vordiplom"… Also, "everybody" and his dog has a "bachelor degree" which makes it actually useless (and made just "regular school" out of university).