This has been debunked so many times. Even if you take the data at face value, this statement cannot be backed up. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/us-students-are-laggi...
Yes, we are behind a lot of countries. A lot of (VERY) small and (VERY) wealthy European countries for the most part, but also a handful of small Asian countries. But wait, we are ahead of Sweden in science? Is Sweden in the middle of some kind of crisis in their inability to educate their children? What about Norway and Denmark? What about Belgium and Austria and France? They all score about the same as the US in science, are they producing a "generation of dummy"?
What about this: https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-the-results-of-pisa-student-a...
If you don't just include the rich countries, Europe is doing terribly compared to the US. Of course when the US average is calculated, they don't just take the scores from the rich states separately.
That number sounded really high to me and I went looking for information to refute it. Turns out 50% may be a rather modest estimate today:
Foreign Students and Graduate STEM Enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
> The report found 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are.
The Disappearing American Grad Student https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
> The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association.
Maybe getting a PhD in the US is a huge waste of time because there's fierce competition for most academic jobs and scarce employment prospects?
From Michio Kaku[1]: "The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. How come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummy. If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year [...] how come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. Let me tell you something. America has a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the H1B. Without the H1B the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley, there would not be a Silicon Valley without the H1B. [...] You realize that in the US 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign born. [...]"
the rest of the video is pretty good too. I recommend watching it.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fphPeRvhjQ