Every Jew I have ever known in the US, to the last individual, has always placed a high value on education. It would seem to be a cultural value--or at least i

Every Jew I have ever known in the US, to the last individual, has always placed a high value on education. It would seem to be a cultural value--or at least it is among Ashkenazis. So it does not surprise me that Israel has a decent, functional higher education system. US culture, as a whole, does not value education for its own sake. We value education only as a business. And much of that business is to suck money from the pockets of those who do value education as intrinsically beneficial, and blow it along to those who provide the illusion of education at the lowest operating cost. If a greater proportion of the population valued real learning, the focus would be on making high school graduates more relevant and useful in the modern workforce, rather than using bachelor's degrees as an arbitrary qualification for jobs that clearly do not require them. If >25% of kids think they need to go to university to get a "good" job--or even to just not be considered a low-status, ignorant loser--it is not the university system that has failed, but the 12-13 years of public education that usually precedes it.