… implodes, University Diaries readers may find her extensive coverage of the Greek university system of interest.
To find my posts about Greece, you can click on Foreign Universities (under Categories) and scroll through for Greek posts; you can also type Greece Universities or some similar phrase into her search engine.
Greek universities are only one of many arenas of outrageous public spending and outrageous corruption in that country. But they’re a very good entry point to the larger Greek economic failure.
April 29th, 2010 at 10:04AM
The run of speculators on Greece is a European failure as much as something specifically Greek, and it’s hard to see how the quality of Greece’s universities is related either to its vulnerability to international speculators or to the apparent folly of the Eurozone more generally. It turns out that Paul Krugman has been right on this as well as on many other things, and he’s never mentioned Greece’s universities.
April 29th, 2010 at 10:32AM
I don’t claim the universities are key to anything that’s happened. They are iconic of the corruption of that country, which from all I’ve read takes place far more extensively than in most other European countries. Because many of its people don’t pay their taxes and don’t let the government — even if it wants to — reform anything, Greece has long been sclerotic socially and desperate economically, has lied to the rest of Europe about its financial condition, and has invited the ruin now upon it.
More broadly, the long failure of Greek universities to function in any meaningful way has of course meant an ill-educated population, with all the attendant consequences; and in particular, in this case, it has meant the brain drain that has taken most of the best social and economic minds out of that country.