I just read this article from Pew Research.
And yet, we have all these tech giants and major tech hubs here in the USA.
What’s going on?
I just read this article from Pew Research.
And yet, we have all these tech giants and major tech hubs here in the USA.
What’s going on?
Comments
We federally fund a great deal of primary scientific research. Or, at least, we did. Apparently what made America great wasn’t leading the world in science and technology.
Few reasons. One, we
havehad an immigration system that allowed the most talented foreign workers to come to the US to work for US companies. So we got the benefit even if we didn’t educate them here. Two, while the US education system often scored lower on tests, it often encouraged more broad development in terms of things like creativity which has been enormous in the modern information economy. Three, it’s just an artifact of how different countries educate their students. The problem isn’t that US students are bad. It’s that US students are poor. The best funded US districts go head-to-head with other countries just fine. And those are the students that drive the modern economy.Brain drain from poorer countries is big factor
Our economy and lesser regulatory burden make it easier to innovate. Obviously, that’s a double edged sword, but the combination of having the worlds largest economy to sell to along with a more business friendly (at a high level) government lead to more large, innovative companies.
Our higher level education is top notch. We have the best universities/research institutes in the world.
The US is a land of extremes. If you only look at averages it may seem middling but in reality it has massive ranges in quality and capability across the population, and its system tends to exacerbate those differences rather than try to smooth them out like many other countries do.
Money.
Immigrants.
Our education system used to be better, and the best-educated people who benefited from the old system are able to use their skills and resources to prepare their children in ways that make up for the current deficiencies of the system and/or obtain superior private education.
So while the average is lower, there is a cohort of kids who grow up without being dragged down by it, and who are then able to go even further in our excellent system of higher education.
American universities are top-notch it can attract all talents from around the world. People from around the world wanted to study and work in the US. US universities attracted best engineers and scientists from around the world.
Second is that the US have great business opportunities. American investors and banking industries are willing to take more risks. This may result in more companies opened up.
Third is that the US speaks English. The majority of the world can speak basic English. This may result in people choosing the US rather than Germany or France despite these nations also have excellent universities. Getting better at your English is easier than studying French or German from the beginning.
Anecdotal, but my experience has been that US tech companies are much more tolerant of failure. The European tech companies I’ve worked for would spend months to years planning out a new software project trying to get things exactly right from the first release. On the other hand, the American tech companies I’ve worked for have always seemed more willing to push out new features faster and pivot if it’s not what the market wanted, discarding bad ideas along the way.
The US is running on fumes. In another decade or two, we’ll be a failed third-world state. With nukes.
In almost every metric that is both quantifiable and positive, the US ranks lower than several other countries, sometimes WAY lower. But one area where we traditionally did stand out was in graduate-level education (master’s degree and above). So lots of other countries would send their top-level students to the US to get master’s and PhDs. But in recent years, that has begun to slip.
The domination of science and engineering in the US is a holdover from the 1950s-60s, when the US made a big push in science and technology education to beat the Rooskies, but that has sharply decreased since then, and now we have a government being run by actual science deniers who are busy gutting every lead we formerly had. The brain drain of experts from other countries to the US has begun to reverse course.
In the past, corporations understood the long-term benefits of investing in blue-sky research because it led to big payoffs down the road. But today, executives only care about the next quarter and the stock price, so stuff that requires years to pay off is getting cut in favor of short-term gains.
If you watch closely over time, you will notice that more and more scientific advances are happening in places besides the US today, and that rate will only increase. We USED to be bigshots, but we aren’t maintaining the infrastructure needed to sustain it, and the foundation is crumbling.
Basically, the US is Norma Desmond, who still thinks she’s a big star, even though the shine has long since faded.
Because just proving that you can essentially memorize a formula does not actually do much to dictate intelligence especially when most of that kind of information is so readily available through either resources at your specific job or through the internet in general
Sure American students may be struggling to memorize some complex physics theorem or something but guess what when they need that for their job they aren’t going to just recall it from memory They are just going to Google hey what is that theorem for blah blah blah and then apply it to their work
Work habits, start early. Poverty and supplemental program appointments interrupt as child learning to go to school everyday.
Free aid programs should have flexible appointments.
Only one factor.
Mental wellness rather than banking on negative labels.
Incentives for children having high attendance rewarding parents in support programs.
Of course we just need to keep throwing billions of more dollars at the DOE
Former educator here.
There’s a number of reasons why those figures are a bit misleading, though they do accurately point out an alarming trend in terms of the quality of general American Education. Other posters have already pointed out the factors related to immigration and funding of technological and scientific research and how those factor in to the discrepancy, so I’ll focus on the American Education angle:
The biggest single reason is simply that the US is very egalitarian in how it obtains and collects that data. Every kid goes to school, even kids with developmental disabilities. Every single US citizen and many many kids that aren’t US citizens all get to participate in the education system, and all of them represent part of that collection data.
Nearly every student in public schools participates in the testing that produces that data, no matter how poor the school, no matter if the kids have developmental issues, no matter if the student has any specialization or specific aptitude, and the same cannot be said about all other countries methods of collecting data on their educational quality.
There also comes the factor that in US schools, often the kids with the best opportunities, resources, and connections don’t participate in public education at all, are privately educated their whole lives, and are thus removed from the data pool.
None of this is to say that the American Education System’s flaws are not also to blame for the slipping data, because its flaws are many and glaring. There’s a reason that I am a *former* educator.
Brain poaching. The US has a solid funding base for research, low regulation, and low taxes, which is attractive to people in higher education
Because we literally hire and buy our way to the top
The innovators move to the US after being educated in other countries or even start their Startup abroad but have a US office so they can call it an American company.
Because all of their engineers and scientists come from Asia.
Because the rank doesnt apply to everyone in the country. You have some really smart americans and really dumb americans. The smart ones are the ones carrying the country through that innovation.
U.S. population talent is not a bell curve.