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From the article: Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link betwee

From the article: Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy. That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done.

bdotdub 17y ago
While it's true that we can see how poorly the American system is run, how does it compare to the rest of the world? I don't know much about the subject, so I'm hoping to get a bit more insight into this. I suspect that even if our system isn't great and as good as it could be, it's still has a leg up on most education systems out there
- NathanKP 17y ago
  Perhaps it is much better than the educational systems in third world countries, but compared with the European educational system Americans are definitely behind. Or course being an American myself it may just be a case of "The grass is green on the other side of the fence." However, from what I have read they definitely seem to run the colleges better in Europe.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    I have no first hand experience with this, but my brother is an evolutionary biologist in Canada. Many of his American peers complain of how politicized higher education is in the US; people in his field have a significant amount of trouble getting funding due to the "controversy" around their subject matter. In fact, according to him, evolutionary biologists have been slowly draining out of the USA for years now (mostly into Europe).
miked 17y ago
That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done. I'm an American who's traveled in Europe a fair bit. I've had several conversations with Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian teachers. All were universally critical of teaching in their countries, the main thrust being that it was almost all driven completely by rote. Teaching in greece was so bad that a large number of families hire outside tutors just to teach things like English and classical greek and latin. There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got. Two other proxies would be number of Nobel prizes and number of patents issued. At least in absolute numbers, the US does quite well. Not sure about the more relevant per capita numbers, though I'm certain Israel would crush in the patent category. While I largely agree with your statement in broad terms, it's too sweeping and doesn't control for things like ethnicity. We will never have great teaching anywhere until we get rid of the teachers' unions.
- bokonist 17y ago
  There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got. Journal publishing and citations are heavily based on social networks and the intricacies of the modern grant system. I really wouldn't trust citations to be a good indicator of research or advancement. A better thing to look at would be the flow of real world improvements that come out of a universities research. Unfortunately, there is no systematic measurement of that flow.
  - miked 17y ago
    I quite agree, but as you point out we don't have a lot of choices here. That's the best proxy I can think of.

bdotdub 17y ago

While it's true that we can see how poorly the American system is run, how does it compare to the rest of the world? I don't know much about the subject, so I'm hoping to get a bit more insight into this. I suspect that even if our system isn't great and as good as it could be, it's still has a leg up on most education systems out there

NathanKP 17y ago
Perhaps it is much better than the educational systems in third world countries, but compared with the European educational system Americans are definitely behind. Or course being an American myself it may just be a case of "The grass is green on the other side of the fence." However, from what I have read they definitely seem to run the colleges better in Europe.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  I have no first hand experience with this, but my brother is an evolutionary biologist in Canada. Many of his American peers complain of how politicized higher education is in the US; people in his field have a significant amount of trouble getting funding due to the "controversy" around their subject matter. In fact, according to him, evolutionary biologists have been slowly draining out of the USA for years now (mostly into Europe).

miked 17y ago

That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done. I'm an American who's traveled in Europe a fair bit. I've had several conversations with Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian teachers. All were universally critical of teaching in their countries, the main thrust being that it was almost all driven completely by rote. Teaching in greece was so bad that a large number of families hire outside tutors just to teach things like English and classical greek and latin. There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got. Two other proxies would be number of Nobel prizes and number of patents issued. At least in absolute numbers, the US does quite well. Not sure about the more relevant per capita numbers, though I'm certain Israel would crush in the patent category. While I largely agree with your statement in broad terms, it's too sweeping and doesn't control for things like ethnicity. We will never have great teaching anywhere until we get rid of the teachers' unions.

bokonist 17y ago
There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got. Journal publishing and citations are heavily based on social networks and the intricacies of the modern grant system. I really wouldn't trust citations to be a good indicator of research or advancement. A better thing to look at would be the flow of real world improvements that come out of a universities research. Unfortunately, there is no systematic measurement of that flow.
- miked 17y ago
  I quite agree, but as you point out we don't have a lot of choices here. That's the best proxy I can think of.