Anonymous wrote:

The riots were about criminal elements defending their territory from the police. The were certainly not about entrance exams being too hard.

Yes, Arab immigrants as a group are not equally competitive, but as individuals they are. There are many examples of Arab immigrants having great success in France. You are espousing a twisted American idea that every arbitrarily defined group is supposed to be "represented" at every institution in direct proportion to its presence in the population. If they are not, the someone is to blame and something needs to be "fixed".

And as a matter fact, systems that track kids do in fact result in more equal societies. Not because of tracking itself, but because they are more equal, period. They might not be as equal in terms of distributing worthless diplomas but that's because they allocate their resources more prudently. A vast majority of people have no use of college education, none. The time of those who do not beong to college is better spent learning jobs they will actually perform.

This is exactly the attitude that Americans reject. We realize that institutional failures can be responsible for differential performance among groups. I think it is foolish to think that arab immigrants are not disenfranchised in French society. America has a lot of issues with equality in our society, but we recognize that not everyone fits the mold and that the ability that you test in at the middle school level can have a lot to do with the circumstances with which you were brought up, not your innate talents.

+1. (I was the banlieues/Fonseca poster.) Family socio-economic status and background have everything to do with performance on standardized tests. There is substantial research to document this. The xenophobic (warped view of US, denial of bad treatment of Roma and Arabs) European PP is turning a blind eye to institutionalized racism.

I went to a good university in the UK.

If you are expecting large numbers of Roma, or even Brits of Afro-Caribbean descent, you will be disappointed. What it did have was lots of foreigners from every country, including several African countries. The Brits skewed towards the middle/upper class, but many communities, particularly the Jewish and south Asian, were very well represented.

As for why there were relatively few Travelers/Roma/Gypsies or Afro-Caribbeans, it wasn't because Oxbridge discriminated against them. I think you might need to look a little deeper than that to find the reasons.

Anonymous wrote:

The riots were about criminal elements defending their territory from the police. The were certainly not about entrance exams being too hard.

Yes, Arab immigrants as a group are not equally competitive, but as individuals they are. There are many examples of Arab immigrants having great success in France. You are espousing a twisted American idea that every arbitrarily defined group is supposed to be "represented" at every institution in direct proportion to its presence in the population. If they are not, the someone is to blame and something needs to be "fixed".

And as a matter fact, systems that track kids do in fact result in more equal societies. Not because of tracking itself, but because they are more equal, period. They might not be as equal in terms of distributing worthless diplomas but that's because they allocate their resources more prudently. A vast majority of people have no use of college education, none. The time of those who do not beong to college is better spent learning jobs they will actually perform.

This is exactly the attitude that Americans reject. We realize that institutional failures can be responsible for differential performance among groups. I think it is foolish to think that arab immigrants are not disenfranchised in French society. America has a lot of issues with equality in our society, but we recognize that not everyone fits the mold and that the ability that you test in at the middle school level can have a lot to do with the circumstances with which you were brought up, not your innate talents.

This is because your institutions in fact forbade women from studying in many schools until recently. Americans also had separate restrooms for Blacks and various other rules about where they were allowed. In most of Europe, nothing like those "institutional impediments" ever existed.

The system is simply pushing and postponing sorting that will always happen at some point - everyone is just paying more and wasting more time to remain in the same place. It is Americans who do not appreciate diversity of choices and are trying, pointlessly, to put everyone into the same mold.

My brother and I were not great math students in high school and we both got tracked out of taking calculus. I am a chemist and he is an engineer. If we had to be "sorted" and had to pick our major at the end of high school, we would have never ended up in our current career paths. I think there is a benefit to allowing late bloomers to bloom.

Anonymous wrote:

The riots were about criminal elements defending their territory from the police. The were certainly not about entrance exams being too hard.

Yes, Arab immigrants as a group are not equally competitive, but as individuals they are. There are many examples of Arab immigrants having great success in France. You are espousing a twisted American idea that every arbitrarily defined group is supposed to be "represented" at every institution in direct proportion to its presence in the population. If they are not, the someone is to blame and something needs to be "fixed".

And as a matter fact, systems that track kids do in fact result in more equal societies. Not because of tracking itself, but because they are more equal, period. They might not be as equal in terms of distributing worthless diplomas but that's because they allocate their resources more prudently. A vast majority of people have no use of college education, none. The time of those who do not beong to college is better spent learning jobs they will actually perform.

This is exactly the attitude that Americans reject. We realize that institutional failures can be responsible for differential performance among groups. I think it is foolish to think that arab immigrants are not disenfranchised in French society. America has a lot of issues with equality in our society, but we recognize that not everyone fits the mold and that the ability that you test in at the middle school level can have a lot to do with the circumstances with which you were brought up, not your innate talents.

If "not everyone fits the mold" then why does everyone need to go to the same HS tailored toward preparing students for college and college itself? All you end up is one college graduate with 200k of debt competing against another college graduate with the same debt for an admin assistant position. There are only so many places at the top, especially in the USA. The system is simply pushing and postponing sorting that will always happen at some point - everyone is just paying more and wasting more time to remain in the same place. It is Americans who do not appreciate diversity of choices and are trying, pointlessly, to put everyone into the same mold.

The riots were about criminal elements defending their territory from the police. The were certainly not about entrance exams being too hard.

Yes, Arab immigrants as a group are not equally competitive, but as individuals they are. There are many examples of Arab immigrants having great success in France. You are espousing a twisted American idea that every arbitrarily defined group is supposed to be "represented" at every institution in direct proportion to its presence in the population. If they are not, the someone is to blame and something needs to be "fixed".

And as a matter fact, systems that track kids do in fact result in more equal societies. Not because of tracking itself, but because they are more equal, period. They might not be as equal in terms of distributing worthless diplomas but that's because they allocate their resources more prudently. A vast majority of people have no use of college education, none. The time of those who do not beong to college is better spent learning jobs they will actually perform.

This is exactly the attitude that Americans reject. We realize that institutional failures can be responsible for differential performance among groups. I think it is foolish to think that arab immigrants are not disenfranchised in French society. America has a lot of issues with equality in our society, but we recognize that not everyone fits the mold and that the ability that you test in at the middle school level can have a lot to do with the circumstances with which you were brought up, not your innate talents.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Right, but it's pretty obvious from all the academic research that performance in school tracks very closely to socioeconomic status, and kids from lower socioeconomic classes have to work harder to catch up. In the US, we recognize it. In other countries, it is purely exams and academic performance. Which is more of a meritocracy? I don't know. But coming from a privileged background myself, married to someone who grew up in a working class family, I realize just how easy it is to take these cumulative advantages for granted.

this research comes from the USA. working class families in europe are in a different position. in my country of origin, for example, there is no such thing as "bad school" - everyone can go to elementary school they wish (wherever it is) and they are all state funded. this is not the end of it all, of course, but it is one of the great equalizers. my parents were highly educated upper middle class and i we lived in the same building with policemen and truck drivers (as well as doctors and lawyers) and i shared school desk with a roma.

I don't envy your education. You should know that a single anecdote (about a Roma sharing your desk one year) doesn't make a dataset.

Sorry, but a system that tracks kids from middle or high school into college, or not, is not going to be very equal. We all know that the arab immigrants in the Paris banlieues cannot compete on the national tests against the upper middle class kids in the best arrondissements. What do you think the riots were about?

The riots were about criminal elements defending their territory from the police. The were certainly not about entrance exams being too hard.

Yes, Arab immigrants as a group are not equally competitive, but as individuals they are. There are many examples of Arab immigrants having great success in France. You are espousing a twisted American idea that every arbitrarily defined group is supposed to be "represented" at every institution in direct proportion to its presence in the population. If they are not, the someone is to blame and something needs to be "fixed".

And as a matter fact, systems that track kids do in fact result in more equal societies. Not because of tracking itself, but because they are more equal, period. They might not be as equal in terms of distributing worthless diplomas but that's because they allocate their resources more prudently. A vast majority of people have no use of college education, none. The time of those who do not beong to college is better spent learning jobs they will actually perform.

Back to the original question...OP, any good European university your kid/s get into is going to offer them a more challenging, diverse and wholesome learning experience than any American university. And I'd say the precise opposite to any European family. College is a great time to engage with a foreign culture.

The real trade-off here is that geographic location matters in terms of job placement right after school and in terms of alumni networks, so you should include these in your criteria.