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.
