Another factor is that people take life more seriously in Iran (based on my very limited data on non-urban Iranians, and the US). There is virtually no social bubble that does not think degrees are important. “Engineer” is used as a general title of prestige, used as an umbrella term for anyone rich who is not a medical doctor.
Somewhat relatedly, college in Germany is more focused on the theoretical than it is in the US. A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.
I very much appreciated the way my public college worked. Very few who started electrical engineering finished. But they would accept damn near anyone. The few that survived had the world in their pocket.
>A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.
Must depend on the college. My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics. There was so much math, I only use a small fraction of it today. Maybe 10% of the engineering degree was practical labs. The engineering technology programs are maybe what you're thinking of? They flip those numbers on their head. It's hard for me to imagine any 4 year degree except mathematics and physics having more math than engineering programs I'm familiar with.
Sure, but if you're trying to avoid false negatives the German system is already poor. In the US work is the goal and there's a lot of talk about finding a job you love. The German system is mainly focused on minimizing the number of people who can't find work. In Germany there's also less of an income gap between professions than in the US (a German doctor or highly paid computer scientist only makes 2x what a tradesperson or retail worker makes https://www.iamexpat.de/career/working-in-germany/salary-pay...).
> My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics.
Was the mathematics mainly proofs? My US university required a minimum of 2 classes with a significant programming project for a Computer Science degree, and many students took 6 or more courses with significant programming projects. My semester studying abroad in Germany, there was only 1 course offered that even had a serious project component. There was a heavy focus on proofs, and all the hardware architecture courses offered were entirely structured around formal verification of hardware.
Computer Science and Computer Engineering are typically significantly different curricula. Engineering is generally part of a school of engineering. Computer science is generally in college of science. This is a generalization of course. This is purely pedantic, but most ABET engineers consider a CS major a scientist while a computer engineer as an engineer. My comments were limited to engineering programs.
In Germany, the equivalent major is Informatik, which literally translates to English as Information Science but is basically Computer Science. There are some colleges that offer technische Informatik, which would be Computer Engineering, and a degree in engineering, but as far as I can tell that's rarer.
Computer Science isn't officially an engineering degree, but I definitely wouldn't consider it a science degree. The only scientific experiments were in gen ed physics courses.
In somewhere like Iran you may see very high graduation rates in part because you may need to be selected as best student (a former employer I interviewed with, the owner got into college because he was best math student in a class of something like 1000 children.)
Dropout rate because of failure to adapt, of course, would be a good thing. Those who aren't fit for a career in engineering for instance were rapidly ejected into a different program from my public college I went to (like 25+% ejected first year, memory says it was more like 50%), which meant very few people wasted lots of money on a dead career path.