Slowly and uncertainly, other European universities are becoming more like us, more autonomous, more market-oriented and raising their academic game.
With the US, the opposite is true, uncritical, and somewhat skewed, admiration. Our admiration is uncritical because we fail to notice that, although the US has some of the world's best universities, it also has some of the worst (and the two are connected). It is skewed because we believe that the heartland of American Higher Educatiob is its famous private universities Harvard, Stanford, Princeton when in fact it is to be found in the great state universities such as California, Michigan and Wisconsin (which, incidentally, charge lower fees to in-state students than the new ??9,000 maximum set by the government here).
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