Education, part II
This post is a superficial and personal overview of the Brazilian high school/university system and then a look at the most popular degrees and some consequences.
When I came to the US I was pretty surprised by US education. Some of it was outstandingly wonderful: the ability to choose arts, longer school days. Choosing subjects in college, having a buffer of 2 to 3 semesters to sample and choose a major. Wow! At the same time, I sailed through a number of US university level courses and was rather weirded out by that. Of course university had to be harder than HS...WTF??
Brazilian schooling in general is 5 days a week, about 5 hours long, maybe 6. There is no choice of subjects in most schools. A typical high school week includes classes in all subjects from this list: Portuguese language, Portuguese literature, analytical geometry, pre-calc, geography, history, social studies, biology, genetics (in my case this was separated, sort of the macro and micro view of the subjects...while in one class I learned the full biochemical reaction of ATP, in the other I learned all the weird ways genetics builds organisms), physics, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, a foreign language.
If you have an inclination that does not include science and math you are dead. If you have an artistic inclination, it wont be fostered in school. If you cannot care for the syntactic analysis of a sentence, you are screwed.
So, in trying for well-rounded kids, a lot of people suffer. At the same time, if you manage ok you end up with a kick-ass basic education. There ought to be a middle ground between flexibility US-style and loads of knowledge Brazil-style.
I left high school in Brazil in 1988. I have been out of undergrad education since 1994 and not at all around ongoing university education since 1997. When I took pre-med chemistry and physics, quarks were not yet taught at the 1st year undergrad level. I wonder if they are now.
[Personal digression, since it came up in my brain furiously:
I have ongoing anger regarding not trying to go to a competitive US school (money and fear of rejection). I also have an ongoing beef that I did not stay another year in undergrad and got a minor in physics (money).]
Brazilian university education: getting in
At the end of the third HS year (the last one in Brazil) you get to go through a grueling battery of tests called Vestibular. It is similar to the Abitur if you are familiar with that. This is the university entrance test. While the SAT & ACT are standardized and their scores valid across the country, Vestibular is unique to a university system. I had signed up to take 3 of such vestibulares, all of them 2 phases long. You also get to pick the major when you register (and you register before you are done with high school), and you cannot apply for more than a major per university system. As an illustration, I chose graphic design in the Federal university of the state whence I lived (public, free, only token matriculation fees, some of the best university courses are in such public universities in Brazil), industrial chemistry in another university (private) and medical school on a third school. Yes, medical school in Brazil is 8 years, no pre-med then med.
Corollaries: I had no clue what I wanted to do, and that it is a bitch to get into a Brazilian university. On top of that the competition is rough. In Sao Paulo there have been years where the competition for a place at USP (the federal U in the state) was about 150 people per space. This last year (2006) for some careers you'd be vying against 53 other people for each chair in a class.
So, anyway, you are in. And you discover 6 months into it that Medicine, or home ec ain't you. So now you transfer.
Not.
Go back to Vestibular the following January, do not pass go, do not collect 200.
Here's a system that forces 17- or 18-year-olds to pick a career a couple of months before HS graduation and then makes it very hard for one to change his or her mind.
Public versus Private I
Public (state and federal) universities are all the rage and have been for a long long time. They are quite often the best schools in Brazil and the place most students want to go. The fees are tiny in comparison with private schools and the accreditation process for new courses is long and thorough. Brazil also has public schooling after kindergarten yet the $$ going in and the teacher quality are not that great (or are not perceived as such). What we get is that there is vast disparity between the elite private schools and the average private schools and an even worse gap between elite private and average public schools. This sets up a crappy reality where the best students pay to get great basic education and get into public universities, while people who do no have money get a lesser education in the public system and then have to pay $$ in the university level to go to a private school. This is the extreme situation, of course, with a ton of people in the middle ground.
Public versus Private II
There are a large number of universities that are private. I am unsure what a university or college need to do to become accredited, but it does not seem to be much. Because of better access to higher ed, lots more people are actually getting degrees. The downside is the quality of the education. Many courses in private universities--and many universities as a whole--do not give a student basic knowledge of the field. In short they are great for money making and not so great for decent education/graduate making.
Where I work we tend to be dismissive of degrees through University of Phoenix (in case I have the name wrong, the online university). Imagine something far, far worse than the deVrys of the world.
Fun with numbers!
The three most traditional university degrees in Brazil are, in order, Medicine/Law/Engineering. Also in order the percentage of grads who do NOT go on to carriers in the field: 25%/50%/67%. The source indicates most of the time people give up b/c the quality of the degree is low, that is, they went to low echelon universities and or did not do well in such universities. The three most common non-field occupations:
Medicine: teaching, public servant, retail store help
Law:managers, retail store help, police or traffic police
Engineering: entrepreneurs, retail store help
There are 84 official degrees in Brazil (art history isn't one, so I do not have a degree there). SIX of those degrees are responsible for 52% of enrollment. BBA (Bachelors in bus. Admin) has 621 thousand students enrolled in Brazil. More than ALL students in all areas related to health. The other degrees are: Law (like med school it starts at the undergrad level), education (pedagogy), engineering, Brazilian lit (actually the equiv to a degree in English, but not), social communication (what the f is that?). The least sought careers: sciences.
Des-education?
In 7th grade one of the disciplines was economic geography. We basically spent a year looking at Brazil from the socioeconomic perspective, after spending a year knee deep in all the rivers, geologic formation and air quality of Brazil. One of the things that stuck was the idea of a service economic (tertiary economy, I believe), where a large percentage of the workforce dedicated itself to service industries instead of agriculture and industry. The 6 top fields underscore that shift. It also leaves Brazil with its pants down in terms of creating intellectual capital, inventions, furthering science and the all the low-level work that is required for breakthroughs and economic growth. This lack of growth also shrinks the number of available jobs. Opportunity is at issue.
Our retail folks, highly "educated", are a mirror both of how education can fail a person if not well-administered, and how slow-growing economies do not readily produce opportunities that can absorb those capable of exercising their degrees.
When I came to the US I was pretty surprised by US education. Some of it was outstandingly wonderful: the ability to choose arts, longer school days. Choosing subjects in college, having a buffer of 2 to 3 semesters to sample and choose a major. Wow! At the same time, I sailed through a number of US university level courses and was rather weirded out by that. Of course university had to be harder than HS...WTF??
Brazilian schooling in general is 5 days a week, about 5 hours long, maybe 6. There is no choice of subjects in most schools. A typical high school week includes classes in all subjects from this list: Portuguese language, Portuguese literature, analytical geometry, pre-calc, geography, history, social studies, biology, genetics (in my case this was separated, sort of the macro and micro view of the subjects...while in one class I learned the full biochemical reaction of ATP, in the other I learned all the weird ways genetics builds organisms), physics, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, a foreign language.
If you have an inclination that does not include science and math you are dead. If you have an artistic inclination, it wont be fostered in school. If you cannot care for the syntactic analysis of a sentence, you are screwed.
So, in trying for well-rounded kids, a lot of people suffer. At the same time, if you manage ok you end up with a kick-ass basic education. There ought to be a middle ground between flexibility US-style and loads of knowledge Brazil-style.
I left high school in Brazil in 1988. I have been out of undergrad education since 1994 and not at all around ongoing university education since 1997. When I took pre-med chemistry and physics, quarks were not yet taught at the 1st year undergrad level. I wonder if they are now.
[Personal digression, since it came up in my brain furiously:
I have ongoing anger regarding not trying to go to a competitive US school (money and fear of rejection). I also have an ongoing beef that I did not stay another year in undergrad and got a minor in physics (money).]
Brazilian university education: getting in
At the end of the third HS year (the last one in Brazil) you get to go through a grueling battery of tests called Vestibular. It is similar to the Abitur if you are familiar with that. This is the university entrance test. While the SAT & ACT are standardized and their scores valid across the country, Vestibular is unique to a university system. I had signed up to take 3 of such vestibulares, all of them 2 phases long. You also get to pick the major when you register (and you register before you are done with high school), and you cannot apply for more than a major per university system. As an illustration, I chose graphic design in the Federal university of the state whence I lived (public, free, only token matriculation fees, some of the best university courses are in such public universities in Brazil), industrial chemistry in another university (private) and medical school on a third school. Yes, medical school in Brazil is 8 years, no pre-med then med.
Corollaries: I had no clue what I wanted to do, and that it is a bitch to get into a Brazilian university. On top of that the competition is rough. In Sao Paulo there have been years where the competition for a place at USP (the federal U in the state) was about 150 people per space. This last year (2006) for some careers you'd be vying against 53 other people for each chair in a class.
So, anyway, you are in. And you discover 6 months into it that Medicine, or home ec ain't you. So now you transfer.
Not.
Go back to Vestibular the following January, do not pass go, do not collect 200.
Here's a system that forces 17- or 18-year-olds to pick a career a couple of months before HS graduation and then makes it very hard for one to change his or her mind.
Public versus Private I
Public (state and federal) universities are all the rage and have been for a long long time. They are quite often the best schools in Brazil and the place most students want to go. The fees are tiny in comparison with private schools and the accreditation process for new courses is long and thorough. Brazil also has public schooling after kindergarten yet the $$ going in and the teacher quality are not that great (or are not perceived as such). What we get is that there is vast disparity between the elite private schools and the average private schools and an even worse gap between elite private and average public schools. This sets up a crappy reality where the best students pay to get great basic education and get into public universities, while people who do no have money get a lesser education in the public system and then have to pay $$ in the university level to go to a private school. This is the extreme situation, of course, with a ton of people in the middle ground.
Public versus Private II
There are a large number of universities that are private. I am unsure what a university or college need to do to become accredited, but it does not seem to be much. Because of better access to higher ed, lots more people are actually getting degrees. The downside is the quality of the education. Many courses in private universities--and many universities as a whole--do not give a student basic knowledge of the field. In short they are great for money making and not so great for decent education/graduate making.
Where I work we tend to be dismissive of degrees through University of Phoenix (in case I have the name wrong, the online university). Imagine something far, far worse than the deVrys of the world.
Fun with numbers!
The three most traditional university degrees in Brazil are, in order, Medicine/Law/Engineering. Also in order the percentage of grads who do NOT go on to carriers in the field: 25%/50%/67%. The source indicates most of the time people give up b/c the quality of the degree is low, that is, they went to low echelon universities and or did not do well in such universities. The three most common non-field occupations:
Medicine: teaching, public servant, retail store help
Law:managers, retail store help, police or traffic police
Engineering: entrepreneurs, retail store help
There are 84 official degrees in Brazil (art history isn't one, so I do not have a degree there). SIX of those degrees are responsible for 52% of enrollment. BBA (Bachelors in bus. Admin) has 621 thousand students enrolled in Brazil. More than ALL students in all areas related to health. The other degrees are: Law (like med school it starts at the undergrad level), education (pedagogy), engineering, Brazilian lit (actually the equiv to a degree in English, but not), social communication (what the f is that?). The least sought careers: sciences.
Des-education?
In 7th grade one of the disciplines was economic geography. We basically spent a year looking at Brazil from the socioeconomic perspective, after spending a year knee deep in all the rivers, geologic formation and air quality of Brazil. One of the things that stuck was the idea of a service economic (tertiary economy, I believe), where a large percentage of the workforce dedicated itself to service industries instead of agriculture and industry. The 6 top fields underscore that shift. It also leaves Brazil with its pants down in terms of creating intellectual capital, inventions, furthering science and the all the low-level work that is required for breakthroughs and economic growth. This lack of growth also shrinks the number of available jobs. Opportunity is at issue.
Our retail folks, highly "educated", are a mirror both of how education can fail a person if not well-administered, and how slow-growing economies do not readily produce opportunities that can absorb those capable of exercising their degrees.