>America has long had most of the best universities in the world.

That's a very questionable claim.

Care to elaborate? I know I'd been making the same assumption about American universities - Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford do seem to represent a good share of the world's best universities.

In terms of reputation, name recognition, notable people who come out of them, publishers of leading research, and advancers of technology? If you looked at a list of the top 20 I would bet more than half are in the US.

Many of those people are imported from foreign universities. If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable.

The ability to fund research and attract the best researchers (not necessarily educators) is useful at education's high-end, which is why many come to the USA in the first place. It isn't so great for standard or remedial education, however.

What do you know? You’re claiming something else but framing it as fact. You don’t know anything!

> If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable

Education quality at most top universities is middling, they’re designed for smart people who will reach for knowledge. Being around the best people drained from around the world provides fertile ground for that.

Yes but there's two parts to this: the teachers and the students. The student body in top American universities (especially undergrad) wouldn't even make the wait-list in a fair number of European schools.

> educational quality, it's questionable.

Virtually anyone at a top tier university would be 100% capable of learning their material and making good grades on it with the textbook alone. Combined with online resources, even easier. The quality of instruction isn't all that important for these schools, it's the decisions around which material to present and how to present it, which they can do because they attract the best talent.

In terms of research, it's been roughly true since WWII. Persecution by the Nazis and the war drove the cream of the European scientific establishment to the US, and the US poured a large amount of government funding into science funding after the war. Things are changing, first because the European scientific community has recovered and also because scientific research has been taking off in Asia.

Standardized tests have been known for years as an very unfair way of judging students. People with resources to prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare for them. High school grades have been consistently found the be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do in college.

So you're saying the SAT gives a bigger advantage to people with resources to prepare, compared to a GPA which is the result of many assignments and tests across four years? That does not sound remotely plausible to me.

SAT + grades is a stronger predictor of college performance than grades alone. AFAIK this is a pretty uncontroversial finding. For a review article, see Frey (2019), "What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement."

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/

Are you discounting that the factors that go I to the GPA are wildly different between schools?

I think the guy that got a 2.9 in a school that was seriously focused on education is going to be better prepared for the 4.1 from a peace and love participation trophy school.

Are you missing “standardized” portion?

So untrue. The best resource for preparing for standardized tests is Khan Academy. It is free.

High school grades on the other hand are getting inflated now, because of parental pressure, now that colleges are abandoning standardized tests, and relying more on GPAs. High schools don’t even have a standardized curriculum. Comparing GPAs across high schools make no sense. Within the same school it may make sense though.

I don't know about that. I had two one-hour tutoring sessions that helped me immensely. Going through all of Khan Academy might have helped just as much, but would have taken much, much longer.

And the alternative is letting rich parents hire agencies who will prepare their kids with a perfect portfolio of extracurricular activities starting year 10 that poor kids have no chance to match.

At least poor people have a chance when it comes to standardised testing.

The question is not "Does being rich help you with the SAT?" The question is "Does being rich help you more on the SATs the other possible criteria?" Because being rich and having resources helps with everything.

And being rich benefits GPA, extracurriculars, and college essays far more than it helps SATs where prep costs a couple hundred dollars and a month of weekends.

SAT prep being affordable only for rich is such a silly meme.

SAT prep materials are FREE at your local library (or high school library), anyone who is smart and has willingness to study - can study and nail this exam.

and SAT is very very easy exam nowadays, nothing compared to Indian/Chinese/Singapore exams

This was actually the very first statistics project I ever did. We had the basic high school level "Probability and Statistics class". We learned some simple combinatorics, some formulas for the normal distribution and the basics of hypothesis testing. The we were told to do some project (it was junior or senior year so they gave use fairly wide latitude).

I wrote up a survey of people and distributed to classmates who had either taken the SAT more than once or had taken the PSAT and then the SAT. I asked them if they took a prep class and what kind.

The results strongly supported the meme.

There was a big gap between people who did and did not take prep classes. There was a small but statistically significant difference between the Princeton Review and Stanley Kaplan (I don't remember which one won) and there was a large gap between people who took group classes and those who had private tutors.

I didn't collect any demographic information but it was at a fairly expensive private school in Manhattan. Mostly white kids. The minority kids were mostly from prep-for-prep.

They have been claimed for years; what is known is that they beat the hell out of every other way of judging students, especially subjective ones. When standardized testing was adopted in the first place it was rightly heralded as a tremendous win for diversity.

Could you name a metric where rich people get less of a boost due to their wealth and status than standardized tests?

To properly compare standardized tests vs. an alternative you need the other half of the comparison.