

Thomas Friedman-- We’re No. 1(1) - nsoonhui
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12friedman.htm

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tedesign
That's why USA are so attractive to foreign students who want to work hard and
get the best education. There is an always weakening local competition.

~~~
hga
I have to wonder about that. At least in the STEM fields, there's no
particular change in US K-12 schooling I know of that you can point at for a
cause in decreased US student interest, unless it's the final decay of the
Sputnik inspired stuff.

US K-12 education has been _horrible_ for nearly _3/4 of a century_. The most
basic, fundamental skill, the foundation for all other learning, was in such
bad shape in 1955 that the whole _Why Johnny Can't Read_ thing got started,
along with a _furious_ debate then or a little later on "Federal Aid to
Education", which then was pushed through in the '60s.

(Note, however, that a large fraction of kids, almost certainly enough to keep
the STEM pipeline filled, will learn to read no matter how bad _Dick and Jane
and Their Running Dog Spot_ is. The success of this "method" was "proven" in a
single study of ... the kids of University of Chicago professors and the like.
It's a middle set that desperately need phonics to learn how to read.)

The attractiveness of US higher education can be largely explained by these
hard to dispute facts:

Our best universities are simply the best in the world, full stop.

In a lot of countries the local universities are very bad (note where Feynman
developed his theory of cargo cult science) and/or are _way_ too small to
support the number of students qualified for them (e.g. India's IITs; imagine,
assuming you qualify to even take the test, being one of 400,000 competing for
4,000 seats
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology#Entrance_examinations)
)). Many good students from those countries don't have to go to top or first
tier US school to get a superior, often vastly superior education in the US.

