In the most recent Chronicle of Higher Education, there is an article (here) about higher education in Europe. Apparently, most Europeans entering college apply to a given department, which doesn’t happen in America till grad school. The underlying idea seems to be that people already know what they want to do with their lives at age eighteen, which in my experience is flat out wrong. At age eighteen, I wanted to go into math and physics, but after getting my undergraduate degree, I entered grad school in philosophy. Even then I expected that I would do a thesis on logic or philosophy of science, but ended up writing on Plato.
I don’t think there’s anything unusual about my experience. I attended high school in Minneapolis, and then attended the University of Minnesota, which many of my high-school classmates also attended. I was able to see what happened to them, and many of them had experiences like mine. We started out with set ideas about what we wanted to do, but college changed us and we went off in different directions. People who wanted to go into the sciences ended up in the humanities, and people who wanted to go into the humanities ended up in the sciences. Even more striking were the people who had little interest in school but who went to college anyway; once there, they suddenly got inspired and went on to graduate school.
The Chronicle article also mentions that the dropout rate in Europe is extremely high. Add that in with the people who would have changed majors if they had been allowed to, and we can see why Europeans like socialism: they are all stuck in jobs they don't like!
Then there is the system in Egypt where in the last year of high school everyone studies for a big exam. Those who do well go to college and those who don’t aren’t allowed in. Moreover, how you do on the exam determines which area you will be allowed to study in college. In my Arabic textbook, there was a culture section talking about this exam and how stressful it was for the students. It seemed very rigid and unforgiving.
I will be the first to say that there are problems with our system. For example, I don’t think we need to have doctors getting undergraduate degrees. Is it really necessary for someone who plans to be a doctor to take all those distribution requirements? Get them through fast, I say. Also, I knew a woman from Canada who was getting a Ph.D. in history at Cambridge. It seems that she would spend three years of studying there (mostly writing a thesis) after which she would have her Ph.D. Our system in which people can spend a decade slowly working toward finishing requires too much time. (I once heard someone sneer about another person because they had gotten a “twelve-year quickie degree” instead of something taking several years longer.) And in the current job market, all that time can be wasted if people don't actually find a job. People need time to retrain if academia doesn’t work out, and finding out at age 39 that one can’t get a good job means that it is way too late to start again.