Some of my friends who went to the US took courses in beer brewing. I don't think I've particularly missed that in my own academic career.
Also, the language requirement that you had would be less necessary here, since high school includes at least 3 foreign languages.
Yeah, the language requirement is a failure of our high school system, though my own language requirement is because my mostly awesome major has some departmental problems. Inexplicably housed in the International and Area Studies faculty, political economy has to keep up by requiring two years of language rather than the College of Letters and Sciences requirement of one. But even my major lets you test out of it, I just came with an unusually deficient language background. I'd mind more if it didn't lead me down this Dutch path, which has enriched my life.
But most of that extra year does two things, it requires social science/humanities types like me to learn some real science (for my life sciences requirement I did an upper division molecular and cell bio course on endocrinology which has infused me with an immensely richer understanding of biology that neither high school nor general interest reading could have provided). And for the science kids, they get some real valuable social science and humanities courses that help keep that part of their brain alive. For all of us, it helps us understand at the very least to be better at deferring to those who know more than we when the need arises.
It also allows a ton of kids to find out what they're really passionate about once they're in a real stimulating environment, being taught by true experts in their fields.
Cal is hard, sure, yeah, but we do something else different too which I think has positives and negatives: if you screw up the college helps you back. As you and others explained to me, in NL you pretty much get to enroll non-competitively, but if you fail your first year, you're out. You're done. Pack your bags. Here, you get second, third, sometimes fourth or more chances. Meanwhile, while their are electives, the curricula I saw at Dutch universities are very streamlined and don't allow for much variation. This might sound weird, but I'm not convinced, to pick my own field as an example, it's better to have everyone learn microeconomics first and macro second, or vice versa, (or the order of taking economics classes vs classes of theories of political economy). Mixing up the ordering of how students learn the material I suspect results in a wider range of total understanding among the population of those students with their respective majors and therefore results in a better educated populace.
Unqualified as I am to make this call, I feel as though you don't get much of a chance to explore and round yourself out in European Universities. Maybe your society already has that covered and it would be redundant, but I'm skeptical.
