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This is such an astonishingly bad article that I really don't even know where to start. I saw this exact same type of drivel with the Japanese in the 80s and t

This is such an astonishingly bad article that I really don't even know where to start. I saw this exact same type of drivel with the Japanese in the 80s and the Asian "Tigers" in the 90s. "Oh no! The Asians are growing at 10% a year - we're screwed!". Give me a break - it's like comparing a toddler to an adult - "Oh no! Little Timmy is growing at 10% per year - all of us fully grown adults don't stand a chance in hell against that kind of growth!" > “between 2000 and 2008, China graduated 1.14 million people in the STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, subjects; the United States graduated 496,000.” > “by 2017, India will graduate 20 million people from high school — or five times as many as in the United States.” Firstly - absolute numbers are pointless since both India and China are 3-4 times larger than America (~300 million to ~1+ billion each). Tell me per capita rates - then we're talking. > We’re cutting back, while our children’s future competitors are plowing ahead. What does that even mean? India/China are third world nations - of course they are plowing ahead - they haven't even began to produce IP on the world stage yet. You're not comparing growth rates in ratio - you can't say a toddler is growing insanely fast - and then state that he is going to become a giant and "destroy us all". > Enroll 40 million children in preschool, a 50 percent increase from today. > More than double enrollment in higher education. If I'm missing a leg - and I get a prosthetic - I do grow my ability to walk by 100% (as in I double it). But that doesn't mean anything - since everyone else already has two damn legs! My growth was just getting back to normal. China/India are like amputees who are slowly acquiring prosthetics. They are starting from an unfortunately low baseline and growing towards normal - they will not overtake us. This is alarmist drivel written by the "won't you think about the children" crowd coupled with poor reasoning, improper understanding of the uncertainty present in future projections - 2030 for heaven's sake! - and a thorough misunderstanding of what growth really implies. This faulty reasoning is also applied to "wunderkids", best exemplified by Peter Thiel's 20 under 20, and startup growth numbers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4104407 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4104407

scarmig 14y ago
For whatever reason, there's nothing that gets Americans excited about doing better at something than framing it as beating the competition. So, if you want education to improve, the best way to do that is to say we need to do it better than country X. American education is, in my experience, pretty subpar, and it's good to try to improve it somehow. The article couldn't hold my attention long enough, though, for me to bother reading the exact how. Rinse and repeat for military spending, exports, increasing energy production, decreasing energy consumption, etc.
maxerickson 14y ago
A fun statistic is that there are more people under the age of 15 in India than there are people in the United States.
potatolicious 14y ago
It gets worse - there is context to the Chinese numbers he's conveniently neglected to mention. I'm not Indian, so I don't dare comment on the Indian side of things, perhaps someone can jump in. China is currently undergoing tremendous backlash and loss of public faith in their postsecondary institutions. A glut of knowledge-based jobs, a remarkable increase in income over the past two decades, and the age-old Chinese affinity for academic achievement has meant the creation of countless "colleges" that barely deserve the name, existing only to bilk their students and hand out degrees of questionable legitimacy and worth. Countless students are graduating now in China with "college degrees" and finding themselves woefully unemployable and a lot poorer to boot. Public sentiment is turning against these schools and demand is rising for government to step in and regulate quality. To put it mildly, China's "200 million college grads" will be mostly way, way out to lunch. Let's compare the graduating rate of legitimate, quality institutions and we'll have a better idea of who's gonna kick whose ass. Even with the quality problem aside, they still face the problem that other heavily industrialized Asian nations have faced already: the dramatic value loss in post secondary education when everyone holds a degree. Both Japan and Taiwan suffer extensively from this, as job requirements climb in response to universal and pervasive college education. Newspapers and websites are abound with horror stories of entry-level data entry positions requiring a masters for consideration. No matter which way you cut it, using college graduation rates is a piss poor proxy for economic power or even employment.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  I'm not Indian either, but I used to live there. Your description of China seems similar to the situation there. There are a plenty of terrible schools teaching "ethical haking" (i.e. windows firewall for dummies) or web design for a few thousand bucks.
wicknicks 14y ago
Yeah, I'm surprised this article to the HN front page. I'm from India. After reading the first paragraph, I couldn't help think that the author was trying very hard to use some numbers to derive some concocted version of "The World is Still Flat". Yes, US has some problems, and they will still challenges going down the road. But India and China have a lot worse problems on gigantic scales. They can't really think of becoming world leaders until those problems are solved.

scarmig 14y ago

For whatever reason, there's nothing that gets Americans excited about doing better at something than framing it as beating the competition. So, if you want education to improve, the best way to do that is to say we need to do it better than country X. American education is, in my experience, pretty subpar, and it's good to try to improve it somehow. The article couldn't hold my attention long enough, though, for me to bother reading the exact how. Rinse and repeat for military spending, exports, increasing energy production, decreasing energy consumption, etc.

maxerickson 14y ago

A fun statistic is that there are more people under the age of 15 in India than there are people in the United States.

potatolicious 14y ago

It gets worse - there is context to the Chinese numbers he's conveniently neglected to mention. I'm not Indian, so I don't dare comment on the Indian side of things, perhaps someone can jump in. China is currently undergoing tremendous backlash and loss of public faith in their postsecondary institutions. A glut of knowledge-based jobs, a remarkable increase in income over the past two decades, and the age-old Chinese affinity for academic achievement has meant the creation of countless "colleges" that barely deserve the name, existing only to bilk their students and hand out degrees of questionable legitimacy and worth. Countless students are graduating now in China with "college degrees" and finding themselves woefully unemployable and a lot poorer to boot. Public sentiment is turning against these schools and demand is rising for government to step in and regulate quality. To put it mildly, China's "200 million college grads" will be mostly way, way out to lunch. Let's compare the graduating rate of legitimate, quality institutions and we'll have a better idea of who's gonna kick whose ass. Even with the quality problem aside, they still face the problem that other heavily industrialized Asian nations have faced already: the dramatic value loss in post secondary education when everyone holds a degree. Both Japan and Taiwan suffer extensively from this, as job requirements climb in response to universal and pervasive college education. Newspapers and websites are abound with horror stories of entry-level data entry positions requiring a masters for consideration. No matter which way you cut it, using college graduation rates is a piss poor proxy for economic power or even employment.

yummyfajitas 14y ago
I'm not Indian either, but I used to live there. Your description of China seems similar to the situation there. There are a plenty of terrible schools teaching "ethical haking" (i.e. windows firewall for dummies) or web design for a few thousand bucks.

wicknicks 14y ago

Yeah, I'm surprised this article to the HN front page. I'm from India. After reading the first paragraph, I couldn't help think that the author was trying very hard to use some numbers to derive some concocted version of "The World is Still Flat". Yes, US has some problems, and they will still challenges going down the road. But India and China have a lot worse problems on gigantic scales. They can't really think of becoming world leaders until those problems are solved.