Never mind calculus; a non-trivial fraction of the U.S. population has trouble learning elementary algebra. The fact that the U.S. K-12 educational system is notoriously a failure compared to otherwise similar countries should not be used to draw inferences about the inherent worth of any particular subject. Not least because that same system also often fails to teach functional literacy, or any amount of basic facts about society that may elsewhere be assumed to be known by any educated adult.

Then why do all New England states outcompete most European countries?

Why is most STEM research produced in Eastern Europe, the US, or China?

This really depends on what metrics you are using and has infinite room for gaming.

US undergrads (both native and foreign born) absolutely crush all of these nondescript places you are suggesting are better, and graduate programs make the gap even wider.

A non trivial fraction of those are educated K12 in the US system.

New England is mostly sanely governed, it shouldn’t be used as a stand in for the rest of the country.

The US was a neat idea we had but it went a little off-kilter around the second half of Pennsylvania.

Texas A&M is ranked 67, Urbana Champaign 41. (USNWR)

After you pull out HPYSM, these are not ridiculous rankings either.

Georgia Institute of Technology is 38th in the world by research impact, with the top ten or twenty being your standard prestige universities. (Elsevier)

If the US is so bad, why is a poorer southern state competitive with far more prestigious institutions from other countries you would perceive as better?

This is ahead of University of Tokyo, Urbana Champaign, etc.

I should have been more explicit; I was being a bit flip, trying to inject a little lightheartedness.

To specifically respond to just that one point, New England is in many ways an unusual region so I don’t think we should use the scores from here to come to any particular conclusions about the country in general.

This shouldn’t be taken as a response to your other points, most of which seem reasonable enough or at least I don’t know anything in particular about them.

Yeah sorry the issue that I run into frequently on this topic is "US bad because those poorer, more conservative states are terrible and if we just governed them like the utopia of New York City, we'd do much better in rankings", and while I think red states have their own failure modes - the stats show that at least some of them are doing just fine.

Sorry for being a bit reactionary there, sometimes a certain opinion is common enough that you respond like it's being stated due to similar comments being a prelude to it.

U.S. undergrads have to complete "general educational requirements" that are taken care of in high school in practically every other developed country. Why does that happen? Because U.S. colleges don't trust K-12 to provide a satisfactory education.

or that there's value in a college level comprehensive education as well

All other things being equal (including quality), high school is actually better than college at doing the "comprehensive education" thing. College level gen-eds are almost universally reviled as a pointless box-ticking exercise that gets in the way of specialized education. This particular dysfunction has effects even further out; U.S. college education pushes things out to the grad school level that are elsewhere part of the later years of undergrad.

We do not trust the average student, however access to universities in the US is less gated on ability or achievement than most of the nations you're going to be comparing it to.

You are right about the 50% but you might as well have said “fewer than 99%”. I mean, the real number is far, far less. A very small percentage of US residents would recognize and calculus or be able to solve a simple linear equation.

Apparently around 15% of highschoolers take calculus. I dunno, I think “significantly less than 50%” has a generally right-ish feeling, sort of like, something that most people don’t do but not like super-esoteric. But it is subjective.

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/calculus-is-the-pea...

It is possible that the majority of students forget it though, I tutored calculus for a bit and it didn’t always seem like their hearts were in it.