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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

> If most people opt out of basic math classes, society will be worse off.

I doubt this. The overwhelming majority of people never use anything more complicated than algebra. Most people probably don’t even use algebra in an average year. And primary math instruction is an enormous waste of time. You can teach a twelve year old the entire primary math curriculum in well under a 100 hours. It would be great if we could make more of the population numerate but most Americans can’t name the three branches of government[1]. You’re not going to get them to learn statistics.

[1] Not a knock on Americans. The US has a great education system. People are people everywhere and most of them don’t care about nerd stuff that they find neither interesting nor useful.

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> The US has a great education system.

Also not a knock on Americans. The US has many great things, but the education system isn't one of those. Sure, there are excellent educational and academic institutions in the US, but that alone doesn't make the country's education system great.

Switzerland has a great education system. There are almost no private schools because public schools do a great job. All universities are almost free and they are still among the top academic institutions globally (e.g., ETH). Furthermore, those who want to learn a trade early on can do apprenticeships combined with schooling instead of going to university and still have a great career. If they wish to go to university later, they can go to a university of applied sciences (Fachhochschule) or catch up on some requiremnts and go to a university.

One caveat: Reputation has a long lead time on reality. I think the US university system is no longer world-leading. It's still good, mind you, but it's no longer spectacular.

The best-known US institutions -- Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. -- are riding based on having been fantastic institutions in the sixties, eighties, nineties, and even early 00's. I think it will be decades before reputation catches reality, but at some point, it will happen.

It turns out massive endowments and fundraising didn't make schools better; they misaligned incentives, brought in the wrong types of people into leadership positions, brought in conflicts-of-interest, and led to all sorts of corruption.

The second-tier seem to still be doing okay -- the WPIs, Georgia Techs, state schools, and so on -- but the elites populate their faculty ranks, and you can see culture slowly creeping in.

More money doesn't always make things better. Go figure.

TL;DR: If you went to top-20 school, and you're asked for donations, donate to a local state school, an HBCU, an educational not-for-profit doing good work in your community, or elsewhere.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Quality wise, most American first and second tier universities provide largely similar levels of undergraduate education, with perhaps slightly differing rigor depending on the institution. The top 10 schools are uniquely able to provide strong networks, money, and access to opportunities that are not available to everyone else. That has very little to do with research output or its academic strength. You cannot buy old money. If academic rigor is the sole determinant of institution quality, then continental powerhouses like École Normale Supérieur and Science Po would be ranked on the same level as Stanford and Harvard.

PISA says America doesn't have a great education system. It used to. Personally, I think this is the greatest threat to American dominance.

And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.

A key reason that America doesn't have a great education system is exactly what you've expressed; people don't have any faith that America even COULD have a great education system. That's kinda across the board; America doesn't do big things anymore.

> PISA says America doesn't have a great education system. It used to. Personally, I think this is the greatest threat to American dominance.

US whites do better than whites in every country bar Estonia. US Asians do better than every country bar Singapore and the fake Chinese results. US Hispanics do much better than any Western Hemisphere Hispanophone nation. Looks pretty good.

> And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.

This does not make the US look particularly bad. Everywhere else in the Western world but Israel is run by clowns too. Even Australia and New Zealand have shown themselves clowns, with their incredibly botched vaccine regime.

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