At leas here (Central Europe) it has the the image of being bad and expensive.
American tuition is astronomical: $40,000-per-year tuition levels are now the norm. Including room, board, books and expenses, most families cut out $60-70,000 per student, per year, because most of the best universities are in extremely expensive locations.
Educational quality, I think, is actually pretty good in US colleges and universities. If you want to learn a lot, you can. If you want to dive in to cutting-edge research, or to learn an incredible amount about a topic that interests you, the people and resources are available.
The students? Not as much. The focus in a lot of undergraduate colleges (and this goes the whole way to the top) is on networking and partying and drugging and fucking much more than on learning. It's not the professors' fault: they love it when they get good students, but there aren't many of them. (I went to a liberal arts college where many of the students were dedicated, but a lot of my friends, even at prestigious universities, found that real students were a minority: maybe 10 to 30 percent are really good and the rest are just there for the scene and stamp.) Undergraduate college has become a finishing school for the well-to-do, and business school is way worse (the students are terrible and their sense of entitlement is extreme; professors have been chastised for refusing to move classes to accommodate individual students' social lives).
You can learn a hell of a lot in a US university, but no one forces you to do so, and a lot of people squander the opportunity outright.
American tuition is astronomical: $40,000-per-year tuition levels are now the norm. Including room, board, books and expenses, most families cut out $60-70,000 per student, per year, because most of the best universities are in extremely expensive locations.
Educational quality, I think, is actually pretty good in US colleges and universities. If you want to learn a lot, you can. If you want to dive in to cutting-edge research, or to learn an incredible amount about a topic that interests you, the people and resources are available.
The students? Not as much. The focus in a lot of undergraduate colleges (and this goes the whole way to the top) is on networking and partying and drugging and fucking much more than on learning. It's not the professors' fault: they love it when they get good students, but there aren't many of them. (I went to a liberal arts college where many of the students were dedicated, but a lot of my friends, even at prestigious universities, found that real students were a minority: maybe 10 to 30 percent are really good and the rest are just there for the scene and stamp.) Undergraduate college has become a finishing school for the well-to-do, and business school is way worse (the students are terrible and their sense of entitlement is extreme; professors have been chastised for refusing to move classes to accommodate individual students' social lives).
You can learn a hell of a lot in a US university, but no one forces you to do so, and a lot of people squander the opportunity outright.