Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20161116194210/@comment-1496755-20161206122620

Life never is simple, of course. You are right - you are more of a geek than a nerd. And I am more of a nerd since I've always been drawn to science and academia :P

Yeah, that's the thing - good education is supposed to make you rich, yet you have to be rich in order to get good education. It's a pretty nasty vicious cycle. That's why they invented this "state fee" thing - to qualify, you must have high grades and exam scores, but you'll pay a very low fee (roughly $500 per year). There is a quota though - the number of such students has to be exactly 160. Not 159 or 161. And this means that when you run out of really smart candidates (which happens around the 90-100 mark) you have to fill the rest of the quota with whatever else you can find, and thus some low-achievers also manage to get low fees. We generally fill it up without problems, but the department of agriculture have a hard time getting all these new students - fewer candidates & their quota is higher. They often have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

I studied at a private university, but I won a pretty nice financial aid package and thus the fee was bearable. Without it, I would have gone to a state uni... though this isn't bad at all. Most of the top universities in the country are state-owned. And they offer the lower fee option, making them more attractive.

I've always known those Asians were up to something... could it be related to those sticks they eat with?