The U.S. produces many of the world's great intellectuals, inventors and engineers. So how does it do it if the education system is that bad? The answer is that it isn't. This is what I've observed:
Its K-12 education system isn't that great in general, but it's good enough.
Its colleges however do a good job filtering the non-academically inclined and catching up those remaining to the rest of the world in 4 years. U.S. college graduates are no worse than say UK college grads in terms of ability, even in technical disciplines. Elite U.S. colleges arguably produce students of equal or higher quality and the elite universities in most countries.
Taken broadly, U.S. grad schools are on par with the rest of the world. Its elite grad schools however are heads over heels better -- which is why everyone wants to go to grad school at a good US university. The funding is way better too.
Certain European countries like France, and funneling societies like India and China, produce more highly trained technical types at the college level, but these advantages wash out at the graduate level.
Most of the world optimizes education at the K-12 levels. The U.S. optimizes education at the tertiary level.
"The answer, I think, is that in education and in science, as in fast food and popular culture, America is not really worse than the rest of the world, we are merely a few years ahead of the rest of the world. What we are seeing here will happen everywhere soon enough. Our colleagues abroad can take what scant comfort they can find in the promise that our dilemmas in science and education are on the way, along with Big Macs and designer jeans ... Most elementary school teachers are poorly prepared to present even the simplest lessons in scientific or mathematical subjects. In many places, Elementary Education is the only college major that does not require even a single science course, and it is said that many students who choose that major do so precisely to avoid having to take a course in science. To the extent that is true, elementary school teachers are not merely ignorant of science, they are preselected for their hostility to science, and no doubt they transmit that hostility to their pupils, especially young girls for whom elementary school teachers must be powerful role models. Even those teachers who did have at least some science in college are not likely to be well prepared to teach the subject."
At the graduate level (Master/PhD) I'd say it becomes comparable, but there were very few Canadian students compared to Chinese and Iranians.
That is really not that hard to explain. Once you solve hunger, clothing, mobility and housing. You basically take away the most important of human instincts which drive a person to work insanely hard for success.
At that point a person has to call upon his internal human enterprise to succeed. That's hard.
America is just a victim of its own success. This is also called decadence.
I had some good teachers growing up, as well as a number of bad ones. The good ones all fell into one of these categories: 1) they were young and idealistic 2) they were doing a sabbatical or gap-two-years before going back to their day job as a children's book author, radio astronomer, or medical student 3) they were an independently-wealthy trust fund kid on a mission to do good. I also had some Google coworkers that taught CS in elementary school; they also fell into the "independently wealthy and semi-retired" category.
I come from a family of 3 generations of teachers, but when my starting salary as a computer programmer was within $3K of my mom's retirement salary as a teacher and I made more in 7 years of programming than she did in 39 years of teaching, it's very difficult to justify entering the profession.
(My mom also has stories about the cultural differences in how people treat teachers. The parents of her Asian students would bring her gifts, always treat her with respect, and effusively compliment her on the difference she was making in their child's lives. The parents of many - not all - of her native-born students would treat her like a glorified babysitter, yell at her, threaten legal action, and generally take a complete disinterest in their children's lives. You get what you value.)
When they show up at parent-teacher conferences, they're usually mad that little Johnny is failing...even when little Johnny has literally turned in nothing all year, even classwork you gave them time in class to do. And hasn't retaken that test you've given him three times to do it at home. But it's my fault that I just don't get him a straight passing grade, despite all this. Or, their parents don't come/get mad when the kids cheat and get marked for it, etc. And, of course, often the parents of the best students do come, when they're the ones I need to talk to the least!
But, contrast them with my Hispanic students (particularly the Guatemalan ones, and the Mexican ones; the Puerto Rican ones are different). The Guatemalan students themselves are always so focused and wanting to pay attention, and the two Mexican girls usually are. They get frustrated at the Puerto Ricans, who goof off a lot.
Now, I don't see a lot of their parents, but that's more because they all work night shift (as do my students). However, if I offered (extra) credit for them to email/call, or show up to parent teacher conferences, every single one of them would be there. And usually they contact us, often through their kid since they don't speak much English, if their grades drop asking what the kid can change. It's very different in the attitude they have towards teachers compared to my American students (in general), and I think anyone who deals with a lot of them daily and gets to know them (one class is solely Hispanic students, so I don't have to worry about balancing language issues between them and American ones).
Edit: You've posted uncivilly to HN before. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
Never mind the issues with union staff you can't fire despite their rampant ineffectivity...
You do make a good point. Perhaps america is only using 2.5 of it's 5%. Half, in other words.
But that's still tiny compared to the sheer amount of foreign tech talent america has been able to benefit from.
Sure, people might be motivated to immigrate here by your universities. Even when I was a teenager growing up in an Eastern European country, I had heard of MIT and dreamed of studying there. But there's a long road to go down before you arrive at your university's doors.
Another thing I would like to point out is that an important aspect of an education system is the access to it. It's kind of like your health care: some of the most advanced treatments are available here, but there's a huge inequality preventing vast numbers of people from having access to those treatments.
Bottom line is that the overall quality of your education system should not only be measured by the quality and prestige of your universities, but a myriad of other factors that influence the final outcome -- that outcome being an apparent shortage of your own skilled citizens.
The interesting thing is even when we had millions of people out of work who worked in technical fields, SV and other major tech hubs were pushing for even more H1-B's.
It really has nothing to do with skilled citizens and more to do with the salaries they demand which tend to be on the scale of 1-3 times more expensive to hire and keep then the off-shore people they're hiring.
Just an anecdote for you:
I was hired as a contractor on a financial application at a major health care provider here in the states. I was the only US born developer on the entire team. That included developers, project managers, and scrum mangers, On a team of 18 people, I was the only American. Several times I overheard team members talking about salary and what they were getting paid. It was shocking to me that I was getting almost twice as much as they were per hour for virtually the same work.
It's not the skills or education that are lacking, it's the cost of the labor which is considerably lower for off-shore talent or H1-B contractors.
Of course, I don't have any direct experience with the few companies that are famous for pushing the boundaries of the H-1B visa.
You can't pay attention to achievement metrics or school ranking systems either. They are almost all relative to American schools only and fail to measure well across different global education models. You may find your local public school as an "A" grade from some rating agency, but it means nothing. The only reliable metric is how many of the graduates are accepted into top tier liberal arts colleges.
Frankly, I'm not even trying any of that mess with my children. We teach them ourselves.
The k-12 numbers are easy to find. Google Pisa.
I believe I already stated that more immigration is not the solution, in my first comment in this thread.
> especially labor that like you is here to take what they can, selfishly, before they jump ship.
What's with the hostility and personal attacks? I'm paying the same taxes are everyone around me, but without the right to influence the system because I can't vote. So I can't see what makes me selfish, except the fact that I plan to "jump ship", as you put it. I came to this country with high hopes and expectations, with the idea that I can not only enrich my life and that of my family, but also work on marvelous tech and make the world better. What my actual experience turned out to be is out of scope of this discussion, but would certainly be a prerequisite for judging me fairly.
for all the talk of "liberal snowflakes", i do find that americans possess a decent amount of personal responsibility, insofar as they will take action to improve their own lives. as for improving their home country, i don't really see many americans doing much other than talk. the only people i see taking action in this way are members of marginalized groups working to improve things for their group and my white liberal friends taking selfies at protests.
Again, I might be wrong, but every time I've read or heard the word "selfish", it was always used as a judgment.
> ask yourself how you can have a positive impact and make your new home a better place
I was under the impression that having a discussion about how to improve things with a group of people who might be in a better position than average to help improve them was also a way of working towards that goal.
> Perhaps that sense of personal responsibility is an American affectation.
This is the third country I've lived in, including my own country of birth. My experience is limited, but it's still more than the average person gets. From that experience, it seems to me to be a generational thing, much more than cultural. It can be seen in different attitudes that different generations adopt towards their employers: generally older generations see their employer as part of their life and a kind of a "family", whereas younger generations view it as a business transaction with severe imbalance of power. I expect same thing happens with patriotism.
There does seem to be at least one cultural aspect to it, though. Americans, as well as citizens of other countries where capitalism has advanced to similar extremes, seem to view things with a sense of "personal responsibility" rather than collective or communal responsibility.
> As one of our leaders once said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. That seems even more apropos for those who have made the conscious decision to adopt this place as their home.
Why would it seem "even more apropos" for immigrants? I honestly don't understand this logic: why would you expect guests in your home to take better care of it than you do yourself? And I use the word "guest", rather than "fosterling", because not all immigrants come here immediately convinced that this will be their new home.
Here's a truth about a lot of us immigrants: we come here with a hope, but not with a conviction. We would have preferred to live a happy, fulfilled life in our own country and we tried, but for whatever reason we couldn't and we decided to leave. The definition of insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Besides, we're not talking about what the country can do for me. We're talking about what the country can do for its future generations. I already have an excellent education. But I have a much bigger responsibility to my own son, than to your country or even my own.
that's wrong, what you are referring to is "individualism vs collectivism", there's definitely very developed countries who favor collectivism, the perfect example is Japan.
And if your point isn't race or culture, but of economic disparity, that is sort of my point.
What I'm saying is that if you actually compare people with similar demographically-expected IQ and socioeconomic situations, Americans stack up fine. It's the extenuating circumstances that drag the overall averages down.
All that really means is that overall averages across 300 million people aren't that useful.
For what it's worth, I didn't go to any elite universities and I make less than 35,000 per year, so I don't have a horse in this race.
The US is a uniquely diverse country, and such a diverse country necessarily will have a tough time competing in average performance scores with better countries that are not diverse and, instead, have a quite uniform culture. So, right away on average scores, the US will have a tough time competing with much of Europe and the better Asian countries.
Also understand that the famous, prestigious US universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, MIT, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Columbia, most of the SUNY schools, most of the Big Ten, CMU, Chicago, U. Washington, most of the University of California campuses, Stanford, Caltech, University of Texas, Rice, Georgia Tech, etc. are RESEARCH universities and do not concentrate on technical or vocational training for software developer positions where H1Bs are common.
Okay: We're considering education quality and using test scores as evidence.
Well, it is Social Science 101 (my wife's Ph.D. was in mathematical sociology, and my brother's Ph.D. was in political science) to control on other likely explanatory variables.
So, an obvious candidate alternate explanatory variable is culture of the country of the recent ancestors of the students.
So, to compare education in the US with that in, e.g., Japan, we should see how (A) US students of recent Japanese descent compare with (B) Japanese students in Japan. So, now are holding culture reasonably constant and, thus, doing better comparing the schools and whatever else we have not controlled on.
Not to control on culture would be grade F in Social Science 101 and give total garbage results.
I.e., no fair blaming the education in the US when the real cause of the differences is culture and not the education.
Where did you go to school? How did your education differ from what you've seen in America?
It's not that we don't produce educated people, it's we don't consistently produce educated people across the board and your location and income is a huge factor in your future success.
Those living in West Virginia have almost no chance, and those living in California have much better opportunities. The US, like many countries, falls prey to sweeping generalizations that are at best partly true.
Some state schools in not well known areas of the country are excellent and very affordable (IU, Purdue, Case Western, Carnegie Mellon).
Used to be, at least in my region of the USA, companies made local investments to build the talent pool needed.
Tektronix is a stellar example.
https://watch.opb.org/video/oregon-experience-the-spirit-of-...
People literally walked in off the street, got jobs, got education and went on to do great things.
It costs more to do that, but the benefits are easily seen.
Today, we see much less, and demand for people, largely from places that do continue to invest in people, has grown dramatically.
As an immigrant, I'm all for better and easier immigration system. As a parent of an 11 year old, I can tell you that what your country really needs is not more smart and talented immigrants, but better education.
When I was brought to work here on H-1B visa, I couldn't understand why the US would need so many immigrant software developers. Now that I've had 5 years to see what your schools are teaching kids, this is no longer a mystery to me. Your education is appalling and is the main reason why I'm planing to leave the country eventually.