Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy.
That is a fairly profound statement when you consider the general state of the American educational system. I never fail to be amazed at how poorly US college and university systems are run. They are full of bureaucracy and little good teaching is done.
I'm an American who's traveled in Europe a fair bit. I've had several conversations with Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian teachers. All were universally critical of teaching in their countries, the main thrust being that it was almost all driven completely by rote. Teaching in greece was so bad that a large number of families hire outside tutors just to teach things like English and classical greek and latin.
There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got.
Two other proxies would be number of Nobel prizes and number of patents issued. At least in absolute numbers, the US does quite well. Not sure about the more relevant per capita numbers, though I'm certain Israel would crush in the patent category.
While I largely agree with your statement in broad terms, it's too sweeping and doesn't control for things like ethnicity. We will never have great teaching anywhere until we get rid of the teachers' unions.
Journal publishing and citations are heavily based on social networks and the intricacies of the modern grant system. I really wouldn't trust citations to be a good indicator of research or advancement. A better thing to look at would be the flow of real world improvements that come out of a universities research. Unfortunately, there is no systematic measurement of that flow.
I'm a grad student in English Lit at the University of Arizona, and I'm not so sure: many of my freshmen talk about what it's like being in 500-person classes, their interactions with GATs who don't speak English, and so on, which appear to be common at big R1 schools.
It seems to me that the major thing the U.S. has going for it is competition between universities to a large extent; after (and sometimes during) high school, one has a wide array of choices, ranging from vocational schools to community colleges to liberal arts schools to R2 / R1 universities. But I'm not sure the latter are great for undergrads, though they're amazing for grad students.
The better question is whether the US will eventually implement real competition in the primary and secondary arenas, so as to avoid problems like this: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_... .
I don't know much about the subject, so I'm hoping to get a bit more insight into this.
I suspect that even if our system isn't great and as good as it could be, it's still has a leg up on most education systems out there
In fact, according to him, evolutionary biologists have been slowly draining out of the USA for years now (mostly into Europe).