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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

They’ve been at it with this narrative for decades now: that US students are bad at math and sciences. Is that why the world sends their best to US for education? If China and India are so great, they’d have great research institutions by now. China, and now India, certainly do not lack funding. So why are they lagging so badly when their gen pop is so great at math and science TESTS?

Oh, you mean doing well on tests and tests only means absolutely nothing irl. I met some great Chinese mathematicians but I also met a lot of Chinese students who excelled in cheating on their work. In my undergraduate years ago, I knew of this straight A Chinese student who literally posted all his CS projects to be done by someone in China. My idiot professors never found out despite him doing it for four years. Good for him I guess because he and his buddy professor went to work for Google.

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1) A nation's average score essentially has no relationship with the quality of its research institutions - only the top 1-5% matter - and that top 5% might just happen to contain a lot of immigrants.

2) The quality of research institutions is way more than e.g. summing the horsepower of the population of the containing nation. Reputational inertia attracting top talent is a real social phenomenon with more than a trivial effect.

Hold on... the world sends their kids here for university. If you look at top STEM programs, it's oftentimes disproportionately foreigners. This means that American kids are not qualifying for those programs, while foreign students are.

I don't know about the cheating. However, confusing higher-education for K-12 is wrong.

Have you been to top tier high schools in the US? They’re filled with international students. It’s been like this for decades. Now you have that in preschools. Look up any elite schools in NYC, SF, etc.

Americans are simply priced out of these programs. Why? Because international students pay ALL CASH. If you’re running a mid-tier schools, would you give 20 slots to American students who cannot pay full tuition or give them out to international students paying full tuition while increasing your “diversity” score for school ranking?

These are private schools right? Sure, I agree. The well-off private schools and the select few public schools in rich areas are exemplary.

Private schools are not the norm though, and public schools like that are even rarer.

I agree that America's education system has higher variance.

Nope. I am talking about both private and public schools. Go to any top tier school districts and you’re going to find these students. Just want to be clear that I am not criticizing these students. I am criticizing the OP narrative that US students are bad at math and sciences. We have the best schools period. Not even close. We churn out the best talent. Again not even close.

I don't really get what you're saying.

The US is a large place, and the fact that great highschools exist doesn't tell us anything about the distribution of highschool quality, except for that one fact.

Yeah K12 and higher ed are vastly vastly different. There's also many reasons for many foreign students at US universities that are unrelated to academics:

- we have the best universities in the world, and lots of them

- our universities are accessible because English is the most taught/spoken language in the world

- foreign student population is coming from a pool of 7.7bb people, whereas domestic is only 0.3bb, a 25x differential.

- foreign students pay full tuition, which can be several times that of in-state tuition at state schools, so universities seek out foreign students to pay the bills

The best people from those countries leave for places like the US at the college or grad school stage. I had a lot more Indian and Chinese colleagues in college and grad school than I did in high school.

That was the case 20-30 years ago. Now they are coming here for preschools.

Your first paragraph is 10, 20 years out of date. And you conflate the prestige & economic power of the US with its education quality. As your example exemplifies, those coming here for school are coming for economic reasons (an increasingly less compelling draw, by the way), not because they think the education here is special.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but China make high tech products all the time. ok not semiconductors, but cars, trains, clothings, medicines etc... even social media. maybe they steal some of it, but everything?

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