My experience is the following: I’m an European grad but did my PhD in the USA . In Europe tests were brutal and you had no help whatsoever from the professors. Your grade in a course was 80%-100% a single final test and lots of people would fail. Also, professors would not restraint criticism toward students.
In USA students seldom fail, grades are inflated in most universities and they not only depend on tests but also on homework and a variety of activities. They also spend lots of time doing extra activities and “leadership” stuff and learning how to self promote.
That being said, I feel that American students end up being much more driven and optimistic and many of them end up trying and succeeding at doing new things.
The usually grade depends on a single test, often oral which puts additional burden, plus, to even qualify for the test, students need to achieve well above 50% average on homework assignments.
The difference between the two regions is IMO mostly overstated. Especially in CS. Both the US and EU have institutions with trade school-style CS bachelors/masters as well as truly top research institutions with real Computer Science bachelors/masters degrees. Saying much more than that isn't particularly helpful.
NB: I'm willing to bet that most of the "hard core science" teams in Europe have Americans over-represented relative to other teams in the company. This says more about how immigration systems work than anything else.
Also NB: being on "hard core science" teams isn't the best way to maximize income/career trajectory at FAANGs, and isn't even the most secure... remember a buncha years back when Microsoft killed off its bay area research lab?
I think it is abundantly clear that research prowess really has very little bearing on how competent you are in teaching say Linear Algebra. Which is how we got the whole MOOC thing in the first place, there is no magic Harvard Linear Algebra but there sure are tons of social mobility barriers and they don't really care for the curriculum one bit as much as having that upper strata origin Ivory league stamp of approval.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/who-trains-best-comput...
Original paper
For reference, the title of the paper is "Computer science skills across China, India, Russia, and the United States"
I think that some elite US institutions provide solid CS foundations but the classes that supply this don’t also supply good scientific thinking. I think that the institutions thought that science and engineering requirements would have supplied this. However, that is very hit and miss based on the quality of the professors you happened to take for introductory science courses.
The second tier US schools are definitely trade schools. The professors do at best second tier research. The average student is weaker. Canada appears even more explicitly trade school like than the US with significant portions of schooling devoted to getting industry experience.
Also, the recent rise in compensation has relatively recently tilted even the elite institutions towards being trade schools. A greater and greater percentage of undergraduates at these elite institutions are majoring in CS.
In many European countries, the five-year master's is still seen as the primary undergraduate degree, at least in universities. (There may be other more applied institutes with shorter degrees.) When most students are expected to graduate with a master's instead of bachelor's, the program is likely to be more theoretical.
Elite schools are a foreign concept in many European countries. In such countries, ambitious students motivated by status and success are more likely to pursue a professional degree such as law, medicine, or business. The ones that choose an academic program such as CS are more likely to be motivated by the subject matter itself.
You don't see a representative sample of European graduates. Moving to another country requires huge sacrifices. Most people from wealthy countries are unwilling to make those sacrifices simply to get a better job. Those that do emigrate for work tend to be more career-oriented than the average.
The most well known universities in England, France, Germany, Switzerland are what you can call Elite Schools. Yes, even in technical fields like ETH, École Polytechnique in Paris, etc
Not sure why you're being downvoted, that has been my experience as well.
I don't know if what parent comment says is true at all, but if it is I think it's because historically universities didn't have a Bachelor's/Masters system in Europe. At least in Germany and the Netherlands you would study for 5 years and that is still the expectation. For less academically inclined students there are other options such as trade schools.
IIRC, UVA's engineering curriculum didn't require foreign language, had it's own writing course, most of the remaining cross-over outside engineering was hard science, with a small number of gen-ed electives (maybe 1/year or 1/semester?).
Compared to my Econ degree, which required 2 years of language, 2 semesters of writing, a mix of hard science and math, and somewhere around 4 gen-ed courses per year.
Edit: Apparently I’ve struck a nerve. But this has been my experience working and hiring at two of the FAANGs. The teams doing the most scientifically challenging work are predominantly European educated and the team members that aren’t are from the most elite US institutions.