Having studied in both US and Germany, US universities seem to have a much lighter focus on studying itself. The negative view would be that the are a lot more distractions like fraternities, sorts teams etc. Another view would be that there is a strong focus on network building. Fraternities and the whole school loyalty thing are practically made for this. It's a clear advantage to have those connections for the individual. I do wonder what this does to society as a whole. Maybe it makes matching people to jobs easier, maybe it makes it easier to find people to even start a company with. I could easily see how this caused silicon valley to be adding UC Berkeley and Stanford rather than TU Munich or the Sorbonne. Maybe it's mostly a zero sun game that's very expensive?