Salty wrote:
It's all in the book. Any look at engineering or basically any graduate or undergraduate major, and you'll notice a complete dominance of American universities. A quick look at graduation numbers shows that China may graduate more students with a population four times the size of the United States, however, a closer inspection of the data reveals that a large majority of the "engineering" students graduated from technical programs in non-accrediated schools, like what you would find at DeVry or University of Phoenix, and these students are not qualified to preform anything other than basic manufacturing duties.
The United States graduates more students in engineering than China, Japan, India, etc, even with the disparity in population and your statement on American Universities needing masters degrees is simply not true. American educated engineers are more informed, qualified, and preform better in the open market than their foreign educated counterparts. And that is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.
http://www.studyabroad.careers360.com/t ... world-2014
The top 5 are all in the USA and 35/100 are American. That's complete and utter dominance.
You're obfuscating.
University rankings are not part of this discussion. We are talking about whether the US education system educates the population better or worse than other countries'. University rankings by and large focus on graduate programs, and so far in this discussion my point has been that pre-university and in undergraduate programs, the US is lagging behind our modern rivals. Our research universities are indeed top notch, so I will not argue that point with you. But trust me, you can get an undergraduate degree from a great research university, and it may be worth less than the paper it's printed on.
Speaking of raw numbers of university students graduated is meaningless, as you've pointed out in your attempt to rebut my China example. I'm glad we agree on that, because I could flip your argument and say that, since the US admits about 50% of it's secondary school graduates to university we cannot compare to a continental European or eastern Asian system which only admits 10% of their graduating secondary students to university, right?
But in the end, the US education system is an embarrassment. We are the wealthiest nation in the world, and there is absolutely no reason why our kids should be lagging behind any others. We need to funnel more resources, both financial and human, into education -- it's the best investment we can make in the long term future of the country.
EDIT: and I've forgotten why we started a discussion on education in a thread devoted to a polyester-wearing Neanderthal...
'A parent is the one person who is supposed to make their kid think they can do anything. Says they're beautiful even when they're ugly. Thinks they're smart even when they go to Arizona State.' -- Jack Donaghy
