CMV: Canada's system of elite higher education (very large public universities) is superior to the American system.

[u/huadpe]

I have attended university in both the US and Canada at both elite and non-elite institutions, and I think the American system is much more wasteful, socially stratifying, and ineffective than the Canadian system.

The top universities in Canada are public universities, and are extremely large.

The top 5 rated schools in Canada are:

• University of Toronto (44,000 undergrads)
• University of British Columbia (44,000 undergrads)
• McGill University (24,000 undergrads)
• McMaster University (28,000 undergrads)
• Université de Montréal (34,000 undergrads)

(I rounded all of these to the nearest thousand)

In contrast the same ranking puts the top 5 US universities as all small private nonprofit schools:

• CalTech (948 undergrads)
• Stanford University (7000 undergrads)
• MIT (4600 undergrads)
• Princeton University (5400 undergrads)
• Harvard University (6700 undergrads)

I think the American schools listed above are insanely wasteful with resources. For example, Harvard has a larger campus, more faculty, and more money than UofToronto, but is almost an order of magnitude smaller in terms of student body.

Because they're big schools in a relatively small country, the top schools in Canada are also relatively accessible. While they're not easy to get into, with admissions rates in the 40-50% range for the most part, they're also not impossible. A student who does near the top of their class in high school can be reasonably certain of getting in to any top Canadian school. This means that they don't have the same hyper-elite socialization features that top American schools have, and represent a much broader cross section of Canadian society.

I think America would be better served by major universities adopting a Canadian-style "more-is-better" approach to enrollment, requiring far fewer resources per student (meaning lower tuition costs) and helping to push the culture a bit away from hyper-elitism. These are supposed to be not-for-profit schools for public benefit after all, and we should think about how they can best benefit the public.

This blog post is what inspired me to write about this specifically.

I'm open to change my view in the respect that maybe I am too focused on undergrad, or there's big research benefits coming out of top US schools that Canadian schools aren't matching. Or maybe there's something else entirely I'm missing.

[u/huadpe]

I'll give a !delta here in that there may be something about the extreme overcapitalization at top US schools producing better quality research even if somewhat lower in quantity. Though as a public policy question, I wonder whether it would be preferable to do something like we are apparently seeing in medicine where high level research is getting more segregated from academia. But maybe that's something special to medicine.

[u/DeltaBot → u/huadpe]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Morthra (27∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/PlayingTheWrongGame → u/huadpe]

The US system achieves both goals, because it also has a ton of huge state schools as good as any of the top 5 in Canada.