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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed EU CS grads are on average much stronger scientifically than US ones. With notable exceptions, the typical US undergraduate curriculum is more of a trade school. That’s fine of course, but definitely not the skillset needed for novel research or even properly applying recent research.

Edit: Apparently I’ve struck a nerve. But this has been my experience working and hiring at two of the FAANGs. The teams doing the most scientifically challenging work are predominantly European educated and the team members that aren’t are from the most elite US institutions.

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I would not say that EU grads are better than American grads or the opposite. They both have different set of skills and strengths.

My experience is the following: I’m an European grad but did my PhD in the USA . In Europe tests were brutal and you had no help whatsoever from the professors. Your grade in a course was 80%-100% a single final test and lots of people would fail. Also, professors would not restraint criticism toward students.

In USA students seldom fail, grades are inflated in most universities and they not only depend on tests but also on homework and a variety of activities. They also spend lots of time doing extra activities and “leadership” stuff and learning how to self promote.

That being said, I feel that American students end up being much more driven and optimistic and many of them end up trying and succeeding at doing new things.

I agree a lot with this, the European educational system is too much "learn by tough love" sometimes.

I am a grad student in a top european university in CS, and tough love has been my experience as well. We have access to the grade distributions and they are steep but not multimodal, with many students failing the first mandatory and notorious courses.

The usually grade depends on a single test, often oral which puts additional burden, plus, to even qualify for the test, students need to achieve well above 50% average on homework assignments.

I think a less pot-stirring way of saying this is to just point out that most US colleges/universities are closer to Fachhochschulen than Universitäten.

The difference between the two regions is IMO mostly overstated. Especially in CS. Both the US and EU have institutions with trade school-style CS bachelors/masters as well as truly top research institutions with real Computer Science bachelors/masters degrees. Saying much more than that isn't particularly helpful.

NB: I'm willing to bet that most of the "hard core science" teams in Europe have Americans over-represented relative to other teams in the company. This says more about how immigration systems work than anything else.

Also NB: being on "hard core science" teams isn't the best way to maximize income/career trajectory at FAANGs, and isn't even the most secure... remember a buncha years back when Microsoft killed off its bay area research lab?

How do we always go from university rankings based on research results straight to comparing what in the US are predominantly Bachelor graduates?

I think it is abundantly clear that research prowess really has very little bearing on how competent you are in teaching say Linear Algebra. Which is how we got the whole MOOC thing in the first place, there is no magic Harvard Linear Algebra but there sure are tons of social mobility barriers and they don't really care for the curriculum one bit as much as having that upper strata origin Ivory league stamp of approval.

> The United States trains the best computer graduates ― by far: We find that CS seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia. The average computer science student in the United States ranks higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India, and Russia. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States similarly outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by approximately 0.85 Standard Deviations (SDs). Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/who-trains-best-comput...

Original paper

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116

This is comparison between US and (China, India, and Russia). The original poster was comparing between US and Europe, which this paper does not cover at all.

For reference, the title of the paper is "Computer science skills across China, India, Russia, and the United States"

The EU CS grads that make it to the US are stronger than the average US ones. They are also stronger than the average EU ones.

I think that some elite US institutions provide solid CS foundations but the classes that supply this don’t also supply good scientific thinking. I think that the institutions thought that science and engineering requirements would have supplied this. However, that is very hit and miss based on the quality of the professors you happened to take for introductory science courses.

The second tier US schools are definitely trade schools. The professors do at best second tier research. The average student is weaker. Canada appears even more explicitly trade school like than the US with significant portions of schooling devoted to getting industry experience.

Also, the recent rise in compensation has relatively recently tilted even the elite institutions towards being trade schools. A greater and greater percentage of undergraduates at these elite institutions are majoring in CS.

Maybe survivor's bias? I assume you live in the USA. The europeans that FANG bothers to move across the pond might be only the really good ones attracted by the top payment. The mediocre europeans don't make it and thus remain in europe, outside of your view. Different culture, different success measures, red tape around visas, etc. all put larger cost onto international hires vs just hiring domestically.

Exactly.

I can think of a few reasons:

In many European countries, the five-year master's is still seen as the primary undergraduate degree, at least in universities. (There may be other more applied institutes with shorter degrees.) When most students are expected to graduate with a master's instead of bachelor's, the program is likely to be more theoretical.

Elite schools are a foreign concept in many European countries. In such countries, ambitious students motivated by status and success are more likely to pursue a professional degree such as law, medicine, or business. The ones that choose an academic program such as CS are more likely to be motivated by the subject matter itself.

You don't see a representative sample of European graduates. Moving to another country requires huge sacrifices. Most people from wealthy countries are unwilling to make those sacrifices simply to get a better job. Those that do emigrate for work tend to be more career-oriented than the average.

I am not impressed with european masters alumni and I have worked in europe and the usa, it definitely seemed like it was the bachelors of europe, everyone had it.. I believe it is more difficult to get into a masters program in the usa.

> Elite schools are a foreign concept in many European countries

The most well known universities in England, France, Germany, Switzerland are what you can call Elite Schools. Yes, even in technical fields like ETH, École Polytechnique in Paris, etc

By elite schools, I mean universities where a substantial part of the value to the students is the brand value and networking with people who can be expected to be particularly successful in the future. The UK has that at Oxbridge and to a lesser degree at other top universities. In France that means some grandes écoles. Germany traditionally didn't have elite schools, with the assumption that all universities are equivalent, but things may be changing. I'm not familiar enough with the Swiss system.

> But this has been my experience

Not sure why you're being downvoted, that has been my experience as well.

I had the complete opposite impression with compspci grads I met in Germany. For undergrad they had a lot of diverse job skills, opposite for US

Could this be due to EU universities studying specifically one subject while US universities require credits in other topics like Languages?

Do US engineering programs actually require foreign languages and other liberal arts coursework? That wasn't the case at UVA or VT in the 90s.

Yeah, many of them do.

Yes, most U.S. universities require a broad range of subjects outside of one's chosen major. This is a good thing in my book. You have your whole life to develop an ever-narrowing level of specialization.

No disagreement here. But then my degree is in economics, not engineering.

IIRC, UVA's engineering curriculum didn't require foreign language, had it's own writing course, most of the remaining cross-over outside engineering was hard science, with a small number of gen-ed electives (maybe 1/year or 1/semester?).

Compared to my Econ degree, which required 2 years of language, 2 semesters of writing, a mix of hard science and math, and somewhere around 4 gen-ed courses per year.

I wasn't required to take foreign language classes but my engineering degree did have a significant liberal arts core. This is pretty standard in the US from what I've seen.

Lol at my state school a cs course counted towards the foreign language credit for engineering majors... that said i did feel there was enough liberal arts requirements overall.

I think that is mostly compensated by bachelors taking an additional year.

I don't know if what parent comment says is true at all, but if it is I think it's because historically universities didn't have a Bachelor's/Masters system in Europe. At least in Germany and the Netherlands you would study for 5 years and that is still the expectation. For less academically inclined students there are other options such as trade schools.

I don't think so, or at least it's not necessary. A lot of my CS classes (US state university) were just kind of watered down so weaker students could pass. In short, grade inflation.

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