More academic humour here. This was a strip born of my eternal frustration over the scholarship process. I always won scholarships, though they were never large. That was partly due to the nature of the Canadian university experience. In the US, philanthropy is a deeply ingrained element of the country’s identity. In Canada, it’s not. Up here, the assumption is that the government will take care of those that need taking care of, so why should I donate my hard-earned and heavily taxed money to somebody else? Neither system is better than the other, really – just different.
In the US, I might have been able to win larger scholarships, but my education would have cost me far more. As it was, with my heavily government-subsidized Canadian university education, I was able to cover my expenses through a part-time job and small scholarships, thus leaving me debt-free at the end. That’s a very good thing.
Puck’s scholarship here is even smaller than the ones I used to get, and that’s saying something!
The whole cost of University issue has gone out of control in the past decade… Quite a shame really.
Back when I got my degree, all my tuition fees were paid for me by the Welsh Assembly… but I still needed a student loan for living costs… and I’ll still be paying THAT off forever. It was supposed to be interest-free… except they started charging me interest anyway. #$%@holes. ¬_¬
In the USA, there are three major reasons College cost so much.
#1: Tenured Professors rarely bring in less than 150K annual salary. Many much more.
#2 An enormous surplus of Administrators earning more than 100K, that do less work than the Professors.
#3 Insane prices for Textbooks, which Professors rarely refer to. But just enough to force their purchase.
Student loans additionally distort the market. And then there are all the BS courses to keep the lower-scoring students on campus and not dropping out; those profs and admins have to be paid too.
US philanthropy tendencies can probably be attributed to Andrew Carnegie.
He was a prototype, certainly. In my small town, the most prominent building downtown is the Carnegie building. It was a library originally.