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Thursday, August 1. 2013

A graduate student from Sweden compares U.S. and Swedish higher education.


Despite Sweden having backed off a bit from their socialist and statist excesses, its traditions of authoritarianism and paternalism persist.


The government controls higher ed in Sweden, and they do not expect much of their students:  Six Years on Taxpayers’ Money - A graduate student from Sweden compares U.S. and Swedish higher education.

Posted by The Barrister in Education, Our Essays at 13:53 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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I had a friend who worked in Sweden for a while (he was American). He was a socialist when he went over there.

He came back absolutely shocked by the laziness of the Swedes. He told me, "You know that feeling when you wake up in the morning, and you feel kind of under the weather, but you pull yourself together and go to work? Well, in Sweden, you would roll over, call the office to take one of your innumerable sick days, and go back to sleep."

He also told me that there was intense trading going on all the time to avoid the exorbitant sales taxes.
#1 Park Slope Pubby on 2013-08-01 17:33 (Reply)
I have a former grad student who spent a year in Sweden as an au pair. It was evidently a dreadful experience.

At any rate, she was totally appalled at how little Swedes of college age [around 20-30 for her] actually work or study and how 'cheap' they all are. She comes from a lower middle class working family in a very rural area and was very unhappy during her stay, mostly due to cultural attitudinal differences I think.

I tried to explain to her that if the GDP per capita is around that of Mississippi and the govt takes 50+% of your earnings you might not throw your money around.

Oh. And she said the underground economy was really big.

Then there were the usual problems of everyone in Sweden believing that all Americans are heavily armed drug users who are in danger of being murdered at any time while they're filing on of their innumerable lawsuits.
#2 JorgXMcKie on 2013-08-01 21:47 (Reply)
Interesting that both of the first two comments reported that Americans living in Sweden had observed that 1) the underground economy was big; 2) Swedes didn't work very hard. We may have a pattern, here.
#3 Gringo on 2013-08-01 22:58 (Reply)
The problem with comparing large social institutions (including countries) is we usually compare something we more or less know about (our country or our school) with something we only know the popular description of (like Sweden or France that we here about in the media or from comedians). Perhaps any comparison is unfair, even informed comparisons since they would still reflect someones bias or agenda.
#4 GoneWithTheWind on 2013-08-02 10:47 (Reply)

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