Scott Alexander

There is one for medicine, but it's universally considered bad.

Public uni is cheap and usually open access.

If there is some kind of selection, for example medicine or architecture, it's a standardized test, so you don't have to worry about optimizing your kids' extracurriculars.

You can just have them do what they like or what is important to you.

You don't have to worry about living in a good school district because anyone can enroll in any public high school, and with very few exceptions, private high schools are worse.

If you're more aware about the state of the country than most of your co-nationals and want to send your kid to study abroad, any other EU country is bound by treaty to treat them exactly like their own citizens.

You just have to make sure they speak decent, not excellent, decent English.

The anxiety Americans have about setting up their kids for success is assuaged, partly because the Italians are less ambitious, but mostly because it's objectively much easier to do so.

Related to the above point, but the EU ensures that in the worst countries there is a lot of evaporative cooling.

The most ambitious Italians are not doom-scrolling about how terrible the tech job market is in Italy, they're learning German, or learning a job, or looking for a job in the Netherlands.

And when they're there, they complain even less than the locals because, well, nobody likes an ungrateful guest.

They don't want to feel they uprooted their life for nothing.

And it's still much better than Italy.

The usual reasons immigrants are much more appreciative than natives everywhere.

The last point obviously does not apply to the richest countries themselves, hence why populism in the Nordics, Germany and Netherlands looks more like MAGA than the rest of the European right.

But the first three do.

Mutatis Mutandis.

The second and third one even more so.

Opportunities are as equal as they can be, realistically, and the safety net really robust.

Nobody is afraid they will end up destitute, and opportunities are as equalized as they can realistically be across the bottom 95%, or maybe even 99% of the kids.