Availability is certainly different. Virtually every US city with more than 50,000 people has a 4 year college or university, and many smaller cities also. Virtually every US town over 20,000 people has a 'junior college' where one can get the first two years of college.

I doubt that is true in Germany and I know it's not true in Italy.

"health care administration"
"community health education"
"human services"
"Social work"

I'm not sure. For one thing no college degree in the US is purely vocational. Even in the technical disciplines such as Engineering at least a quarter of the required curriculum is in the humanities and much more of the curriculum is in math and the physical sciences. Management may also be in this curriculum.

Social work comprises far more than is apparent from the name. Graduate social workers do a great deal of the counseling in the US, particularly family counseling and marriage counseling. Surely these are professional roles any way one looks at it? The other roles you list appear to be specialisations of a business or management curriculum, and health education could be looked at as a hybrid of health sciences and education. These are not professional occupations in Germany?

You cannot simply dismiss these programs because German universities do not offer them. Surely Germany has many people who do these things - and I doubt that they come from apprentice programs, at least at the higher levels.

Also you should understand that the US has lower-level one and two-year degrees offered by community colleges and junior colleges in all of these areas - so the university degrees mark advanced programs.

Given the degree of respect offered globally to the US higher education system (notably in Asia) one might conclude that if the US has found these programs worthy of univertisty degree status - they actually might be? Rather than dismissing them as you seem to do?

"That said if you are fortunate enough to join a Lehrstuhl and escape the hoi polloi, it can be a remarkably educational experience."

Lehrstuhl translates to 'chair'. I infer that these programs are students srongly associated with a learned faculty specialising in a certain discipline. Perhaps similar to some academic Masters (and a very few baccalaureate )programs in the US or the English tutorial system. Correct?

I agree, Detlef, though I'm not so sure that social mobility in the US is static. My take is that it is getting worse in the US also. I'm not sure I can identify a country in the G8 in which it is not. We're too rich and set in our ways.

I used to oppose affirmative action in the US but have changed my mind. There are a lot of difficulties but it is one factor which works against the creation of a class-based society.

The problem with AA is that it really doesn't help poor blacks and hispanics much; it helps the already successful. The other problem is that the way AA is implemented it tends to hurt the poor in groups which nominally are not 'disadvantaged', so on balance it may do as much damage as it does good. Or perhaps more. It also gives a sop to the concious of wealthy liberals who shamelessly promote their offspring at the expense of those who aren't advantaged while congratulating themselves that they are enlightened because they support AA.

To rebuild social mobility to where it should be we're going to have to see the entire problem rather than small parts of it. The fact is that the loss of social mobility is occuring across the entire society - not only to blacks or hispanics.

You can count me something of a skeptic about the concept of 'meritocracy' at least in the implementation. The reason is becuase 'meritocracy' seems in practice to reduce to be the invariable victory of the scions of the middle classes.

This seems to be occuring everywhere in the western world (not excluding Germany) whether it is called a meritocracy or not.

One only need look at admission to the best schools and the composition of the privileged classes to see that certain groups seem to be filtered out (largely anyway).

It's doubtful that this is due to intelligence or native ability (at least in the US). Anyone well-read enough in American social history realizes that today's successful groups have frequently been regarded as the bottom of the human refuse heap in times past. In the US one needs look no further than Irish and Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews to see that. I'm unwilling to bet against the current US underclasses (blacks and Hispanic-Americans) over the next century because I feel they possess am much human potential as anyone else - if we and they can only remove the obstacles to their development.

Similarly, Turks seem to occupy an inferior position in Germany, Moroccans an inferior position in France and Spain, etc.

What people call 'meritocracy' is a major part of the problem. The middle classes ensure the primacy of their offspring through this mechanism. They offer superior schooling - not wrong, necessarily. But the demise of superior schooling offered to the disadvantged classes is a marked trend of the past 50 years in the US - the poor have almost no good schooling options.The best schools tend to be in the best areas. The poor are exclused by tuition fees or being unable to afford to live in the catchment areas (school districts in the US) offering superior public education. Elite schools which once existed in slum areas have been watered down to the point where they no longer functionally exist.

@Tuomas,

I agree with you that the theory of meritocrcy is much prettier than what I painted - but one needs lo look at what is actually occuring - not the theory. Communism was a beautiful theory but a brutal fact in most places (excepting parts of Italy and France).

I have watched believers in meritocracy destroy elite public education programs aimed at the poor in the US and the UK (in the name of 'equality' both times). Now many of them are fighting the school choice movement in the US. Their children are getting good schooling - to hell with the others!

One more thing. Were you aware that more than 60% of places in US 'selective' universities go to applicants with some form of special advantage (parents, athletics, racial and other preferences, etc)? It's a fact. How does that fit in with 'meritocracy'?