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The grade school system is terrible and needs improvement. Luckily they do not run the university system. The US consistently has more top universities than any other country.

US News and World Report: http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-rankings/top-400-universities-in-the-world ARWU (compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University): http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp QS World Rankings (compiled by a London corp): http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011

One Small example, Stanford, who is #3 in several rankings, has 8 Nobel laureates and 1 Fields Medal among its alumni, pretty good isn't it?

However, this example is completed with the École normale supérieure - Paris (usually out of the top30), despite being very small (compared to the number of Stanford students), it has 12 Nobel laureates and 10 Fields medal.

In France, research isn't as strictly linked to the university (due to the way legal setting is there), as it is in the US, I guess that makes such universities decrease their ratings, and gives US unviersities an advantege in the evaluation (papers and citations generated from the university are evaluated and have weight).

The grade school system is terrible and needs improvement. Luckily they do not run the university system. The US consistently has more top universities than any other country.

US News and World Report: http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-rankings/top-400-universities-in-the-world
ARWU (compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University): http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp
QS World Rankings (compiled by a London corp): http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011

For a military state such as Israel, it is impressive that every now and then they come up with innovations; not very many, but they do come up with them.

Funny.

I suggest you take a look at, e.g, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-up_Nation. Here's one paragraph (the source is backed by reference):

"How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million people, only sixty years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources -- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the United Kingdom?[4] The Economist notes that Israel now has more high-tech start-ups and a larger venture capital industry per capita than any other country in the world."

Or, e.g., browse the list that ranks the top-100 computer science departments in the world and observe where and how many times the Israeli flag appears in the list. (FYI, Israel has only 6 universities.)

etc. etc.

The USA currently has the most top-ranked universities in the world by a very wide margin. No other nation on earth has more than two universities that are customarily ranked in the top 10, and that would be the British with Cambridge and Oxford and no, they're not usually ranked 1 and 2. You can look these things up easily even using sources outside the US. According to the Shanghai-based Academic Ranking of World Universities there's the top 10:

1. Harvard (USA)
2. UC-Berkeley (USA)
3. Stanford (USA)
4. MIT (USA)
5. Cambridge (UK)
6. California Institute of Technology (USA)
7. Princeton (USA)
8. Columbia (USA)
9. U. Chicago (USA)
10. Oxford (UK)

Notice a pattern? Just in case you're too lazy to click the link, 19 of the top 25 are in the USA. Now that doesn't mean that there are not huge problems facing American universities. I've worked at several different American universities over the past 15 years and the problems were similar: tuition is much too high, state support of state universities is at the sick joke level, for instance the University of Oregon at one point had 3% of its budget covered by the state of Oregon. That's no typo: three (3) percent. Sick joke level state funding forces universities to raise revenue elsewhere (tuition), which angers citizens of that state, forcing state politicians to further cut funding in a potentially terminal downward spiral. The University of Wisconsin system is facing a quarter billion dollar budget cut, with UW-Madison losing 13% of its funding from the state. Included in that link is that UW-Madison tuition might increase by 10% and that's after recent double-digit tuition hikes from the last time Wisconsin whacked the university budget by a quarter billion.

It's not just the beating American universities are taking from the state budgets. A serious and growing problem is that if you walk around on any campus today you will see a large percentage of buildings that were put up in the 50's to the 70's. At that time the universities were growing at a phenomenal rate due to exploding enrollment. Buildings were put up fast, put up cheap, and are long since out-grown, worn out, and used up. An added feature is that many "temporary" buildings were erected with an intended ~25 year lifespan and are still standing 30 years after they were to be torn down. There's probably a billion-dollar wish list at any mid-sized university to replace these buildings. Even for building that are still within their useful lifespan there is the issue of deferred maintenance. Most states have a half-billion dollar backlog and it's hardly the kind of thing you can get rich donors to open their wallets for. It is no small matter at all: when staying in a dorm at a major state university (to be nameless) the ceiling caved in on me. You can't apply bandaids to a 50 year old roof without consequences.

So American universities are currently the envy of the world. Walk into any science or engineering department and feast your eyes on the best and the brightest of the world. It is not to last however. American universities are crumbling and I've personally witnessed the decay. With the combination of declining state funding, inadequate federal grant dollars, skyrocketing tuition, and the war against education waged by the Republican party, American universities will become 2nd rate and falling soon.

You're wrong, but short of a radical and unlikely change in American priorities, you're only wrong by a few decades.

Spot on. if you look at the methodology you can see 10% of the final score depends on the "Quality of Education" metric, and that is just a list of Nobel and Fields winners so if a university has never produced one its "Quality of Education" is zero.

Well sorry but I'll take the worlds most reputable university ranking systems such as QS/Times (UK based) and ARWU (Chinese) ahead of the opinion of your relative who works at Princeton:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education-QS_World_University_Rankings#Times_Higher_Education_-_QS_World_University_Rankings_.28Top_20.29
http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp


I agree that (government run) public education at the lower levels in the US is awful but the top private educational institutions especially at college level are the best in the world by far. Take ARWU rankings. There are 54 US universities in the top 100, and only one from Sweden. Even taking into account the difference in population size that is a big gap. It's nothing to do with the brain drain or any such nonsense. It's to do with the fact that in the US these universities operate under highly competitive environment and market forces are playing their part and forcing them to improve while in many European countries that is not the caase.

And in case you don't like the the world's most reputable university rankings above, here is (according to Wikipedia) the second one:

http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp

Could it be that the US has 54 out of the world's best 100 universities because they are more like businesses?

>> Suck it, Europe! What with Canada...
>> USA! FUCK YEAH!

> How's your education system going? Any improvements?

Not bad. How does yours compare?

That's assuming that Mcgill and Harvard are equivalent schools.

They are.

Not even close.

I can provide quite a few more ranking lists for other sources with similar results. Canadian universities are generally a shit stain on the faced of the American continent who like to fantasize that they matter.

About the only thing our floppy-headed inferiority-complex-laden neighbors have that's worth a damned is here and here.

We agree that you can't compare tax rates directly, but I also think it's a mistake to compare two countries such as the US and Sweden like this, although you've provided a good start.

One reason is because the US has far more expenditures than Sweden. For example, the US pays 4.06% of it's GDP vs 1.5% for Sweden. And yes, friendly countries spend less *because* the US spends more.

As another example, illustrating the difficulty in establishing fair comparisons, is that although perhaps most Swedish colleges cost less than most American ones, you might not be comparing equivalent quality. American universities tend to be ranked quite well, with (allegedly) 17 out of the top 20, whereas Sweden's best is ranked at #86. I went to a public American university (ranked #28 on that list), and paid only a few thousand dollars (not including room+board) and I finished debt free, far less than your 50k$ lower bound estimate. My grad school is ranked higher, and they paid me ~25k$/yr, because there's plenty of money in the US for basic research.

Furthermore, several US states/regions are really struggling, for various reasons, and drag the over all American averages down. A better comparison would be to compare individual US states vs Sweden. Maybe the best comparison would be Sweden vs "New Sweden", aka Minnesota. But this is already off topic, so I won't bother. :-)

Something very weird happens here in Mexico.

According to several international studies*, The National Automonous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the National Polytechnics Institute (IPN), the two largest public universities in the country, are the best institutions of higher learning in the country.

Yet it is very common to see "UNAM, IPN, graduates need not apply" in job listings. Why?

Because employers seem to believe that the networking and prestige of the exclusive private schools are worth more than being a graduate of the two institutions that generate 90% of the scientific research in the country!

Sources:
http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/results/2007/overall_rankings/top_400_universities/
http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_TopAmer(EN).htm

maybe because the education system is not as good as other developed/ing countries?


Yeah, that's why we win all those Nobel Prizes and have so many of the top universities. Because our education system is bad.

Try again.

P.S. English is written with both upper and lower case letters. Perhaps your superior education didn't include that nuance?

The best students in the world go to the best Universities in the world. The Universities in the United States consistently dominate the top universities in the world.

Considering that graduation in the USA is a big business, any claim that universities from that country are the best should be treated with suspicion.

Now what is this site you're linking to? I've never heard about that.

That thing looks like made by someone who just learned to create html pages.
The about page is hosted in what looks like being from a Chinese university.

If you want such argument to be taken seriously, try at least to provide some reliable sources.

The best students in the world go to the best Universities in the world. The Universities in the United States consistently dominate the top universities in the world.[1] Thus, it isn't surprising that many people from other countries come here to study.

[1] http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm