I'm not sure this is necessarily bad news. It's a great thing if this means that India and China are producing highly educated, productive people in large numb

I'm not sure this is necessarily bad news. It's a great thing if this means that India and China are producing highly educated, productive people in large numbers. It's a bad thing if India and China haven't improved, and the US is just slipping badly. That said, we really have to stop holding India and China as a model for education. Yes, they've had some tremendous success, but they absolutely do not produce hundreds of thousands of ultra talented scientists and engineers. Most "stem workers" produced from this system are unemployable as by the standards we have in the US (to be fair, so are many college grads in the US - we just don't record them as "engineers" in our numbers). IIT is a remarkable institution, but it is tiny. I think something like the University of California system - which provides a quality education to hundreds of thousands - is much better approach. Personally, I'd learn from China and India, sure, but I'd prefer that we set our own standards for excellence as a nation and strive to achieve them.