I am French, and I have studied at an Engineering School in France (probably what you call "technical university") and at a British university. I agree that ou

I am French, and I have studied at an Engineering School in France (probably what you call "technical university") and at a British university. I agree that our higher education is doing something right. The problem is what comes before that. In France, to have an engineering degree (equivalent of a MSc) from a top school, you go through: - High school, where the quality of education and the technical level is very low IMO. - CPGE. This is a French specificity, two years dedicated to preparing competitive exams. Basically, you only study maths and physics in the abstract there. This is the reason why our math level is so high compared to other countries. But the math we study is not the most useful: lots, lots of analysis, a decent amount of algebra, almost no statistics and nothing discovered since the end of the XIXth century (exit Turing, exit Gödel...). - Only after that do you study at a "Grande École" for three years... But you have to catch up things like project management and so on so real technical education is limited. In the end, we produce generalists that are often good at everything but very good at nothing. Those of use who want to understand a domain in depth often go study abroad. This is what I did, I went to the UK to study distributed computing. I had students from all over the world in my class and I was impressed by those from Poland. I don't know how you do it, they may not have not know the most on arrival but they were certainly learning the fastest (along with student from Czech Republic).