I am well aware of the quality of the schools in Iran and can directly compare it US schools, having gone to school in both countries. That Newsweek article is

I am well aware of the quality of the schools in Iran and can directly compare it US schools, having gone to school in both countries. That Newsweek article is not surprising to me, but in some areas it is inaccurate in my opinion. You do see high quality individuals graduating from Sharif university, which is highlighted in the article, but concluding the school itself is "successful" or competitive is incorrect. The fact of the matter is that there is a nationwide exam to enter college level education for all schools and you basically choose your school (and major) based on your rank in that exam. In that society, engineering majors, specifically Electrical Engineering majors, tend to have high status, so if you do well, you end up going to study EE at Sharif University, probably not because you are a fan of EE or you think Sharif is any good: it just has to be better than other schools. The outcome of this is simple: you'll have selected top N individuals from an exam of half a million people and put them in a single school. Of course you're going to see those people shine. That says _nothing_ about the absolute quality of what that school gives you, just how good it is relative to its peers in the country, and I define quality as "output - input". The "input" is high quality, but the delta is merely meh in my opinion. Also, the students are high quality--the faculty are generally not (unlike what's mentioned in the article), but they do end up taking some credit. In terms of the contribution of the country, I can just say that she is a survivor of an accident years ago, where seven talented math students died, whom had similar achievements to hers at the time. Overall, the contribution of the country to its mathematicians has been negative, specifically so to the female ones.