No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level.

Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice.

In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.