Let me phrase it this way for you. The best universities are in the US for a lot of things. But they don't scale.

In another way, the top talent gets Ferraris for their tuition, the rest gets a bike. In a lot of European countries everyone can get the Toyota Camry of education, decent but not world class. That does scale though.

Spending isn't everything, it's how you apply that spending.

I very much disagree with your statement.

A lot.

As an European I can assure you even public second tier universities have excellent education.

Where they lag the rankings is where money matters: politics to be highly ranked and money for high impact research.

But when it comes to testing proficiency in e.g. science and math, the second university of Rome ranks higher than most ivy leagues in US ;)

As a European I think you missed my point.

For science/math would you rather go to Rome or MIT? I know which one I would pick if they cost the same. A lot of it is also the people you're surrounded by.

It is true that throwing money at problems is a lazy and ineffective way to address them. American education is very well funded in general, but very poorly executed. There is absolutely no room for arguments about the lack of money where the US is concerned. It is shameful for Americans to make such arguments.

Much of the problem comes from a poor grasp of what education is and is for, and because of that, money and effort are not allocated properly. One source of the problem are various educational fads. I personally remember when computers were artificially jammed into school curricula for no good reason. There was absolutely no merit to what was being done. But how much do you think the companies selling that garbage made out?

Or consider the publishing industry that fleeces schools and students with 12978th editions of the same poorly-presented material packaged in overpriced books. Financially, education is quite cheap, but there are sectors of the economy devoted to convincing pedagogues and politicians that it isn't, and that what you need to do is buy in order to "change with the times". Sorry, but basic education isn't fast fashion. Materially, basic education is stable and cheap.

Another problem is that American culture is pragmatic to a fault. Americans have a long history of viewing education, particularly the university, with distaste, as some kind of "European", un-American, and aristocratic thing. This explains the appeal of the pragmatic turn of the university: you now go to university to "get a job". Of course, that isn't the core mission of the university, and most professions don't require anything the university might provide, especially not at these absurd costs (hence why GenZ is seeing something like a 1500% increase in pursuing trades).

We have a cultural momentum that must fizzle out or must be reshaped. Where the modern university specifically is concerned, its days may very well be numbered. It may very well be forced to undergo very painful changes, or crumble, with a new crop of smaller colleges taking their place. Where primary education is concerned, parents are increasingly taking their children out of the savage factory known as public education. This, too, may force public education to finally deal with its dysfunction, or collapse.

That's a meaningless stat in absolute terms, US lags other developed nations as % of GDP spending, and the level of primary and secondary education shows it. US adults lag in cognitive or even reading capabilities.