Thomas Friedman-- We’re No. 1(1)

I have to wonder about that. At least in the STEM fields, there's no particular change in US K-12 schooling I know of that you can point at for a cause in decreased US student interest, unless it's the final decay of the Sputnik inspired stuff.

US K-12 education has been horrible for nearly 3/4 of a century. The most basic, fundamental skill, the foundation for all other learning, was in such bad shape in 1955 that the whole Why Johnny Can't Read thing got started, along with a furious debate then or a little later on "Federal Aid to Education", which then was pushed through in the '60s.

(Note, however, that a large fraction of kids, almost certainly enough to keep the STEM pipeline filled, will learn to read no matter how bad Dick and Jane and Their Running Dog Spot is. The success of this "method" was "proven" in a single study of ... the kids of University of Chicago professors and the like. It's a middle set that desperately need phonics to learn how to read.)

The attractiveness of US higher education can be largely explained by these hard to dispute facts:

Our best universities are simply the best in the world, full stop.

In a lot of countries the local universities are very bad (note where Feynman developed his theory of cargo cult science) and/or are way too small to support the number of students qualified for them (e.g. India's IITs; imagine, assuming you qualify to even take the test, being one of 400,000 competing for 4,000 seats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology... )). Many good students from those countries don't have to go to top or first tier US school to get a superior, often vastly superior education in the US.