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Comment by rick_2047 | Hacker News Reader

rick_2047

If only Indian colleges worked that way. They have only one way to get it (I mean the finest one's IITs/NITs/BITS/IIIT/Best state colleges), give there entrance exam after 12th class. Crack it, your in, don't crack it, your out.

Also I like how the American colleges allow you to take several classes which are not related to my branch. I could tailor my degree to my requirements.

<irrelevant unfulfilled desire> If I had the chance I would have taken basic and advanced electronics (from semiconductor theory to VLSI anything in between), all the computer achitecture classes (from digital systems to advanced parallel computing systems) with embedded systems & DSP, lots of math and 4 specific computer science classes (algorithms, operating systems, AI and data structures).

That would have really fulfilled all my desires.

</irrelevant unfulfilled desire>

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This is pretty much the way it is in any country with a non-dysfunctional school system. Germany, Japan, etc.

In the U.S. we have been hypnotized by the notion of everybody is special" and "anybody can make it". (Also, "everybody has to go to college if they want a good job".) This sort of milquetoast egalitarianism has had the expected result: diminished educational standards, even the Ivies. If you flunk the university admissions exam in Germany, you can still go to trade school and end up with an education at least as good as a U.S. undergraduate degree.

For a country with a dysfunctional university system, the US certainly seems to create a disproportionate share of the good research.

These days, that's mainly because we import so many East Asians, Indians, and Europeans into our postgrad programs.

We import them from American universities though. Our high schools are way more broken than our colleges.

That disconnect has always confused me. How does country manage to maintain the best universities and among the worst high schools in the first world?

"Imports" have always been our research strength :-). Thank you Germany for going all crazy in the 30s giving us an era's worth of top-tier scientists.

Except those scientists stayed in America.

Today's crop of Chinese and Indian scientists want to go back to China and India.

The claim is that the undergraduate education component of the US university system is broken, not that the basic research component of the US university system is broken.

You're conflating two completely unrelated failings. For example you ignore the fact that in the US the SAT/ACT carry large weight with most schools, and you know what? It's a terrible predictor of college success. Contrary to the this post, most attendees of prestigious schools have all the traditional qualifications. The failures of the American education system are far and wide, but giving too many people an equal shot at a good education are far from one of them.

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