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.
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.