I was educated in eastern Europe through grade 10 as a bright but somewhat lazy B+ student. I then completely sailed through grade 11 and 12 in Minnesota as an A++ student (battling for 1st GPA), and NOT due to my own brilliance :). We simply covered USA grade 11 and 12 material in greater depth in grade 10, whether physics or Shakespeare (calculus was the only thing slightly new so I took grade 12 2nd semester calculus in grade 11, then again grade 12. These were ap and ib courses in usa too). By the end of my North American computer science university, I was too embarrassed to talk to my friends from the old country. I could barely understand what they were talking about. Today I am reasonably successful, and have a job that's a multiple of their salary, but I would never claim it's due to my education or that I am smarter / better educated - I just live in a "better place" (for that very specific criteria).
That's personal anecdata of course, but by most metrics, USA education is a poor return on the money invested whether compared to fellow developed or other countries. I've rarely seen education brought up as our competitive advantage. In fact there's a sibling post on front page right now detailing the myriad issues with usa education system and how far we are falling behind the global norm :-(
A Production Tech who is maintaining, cleaning, and repairing electronics would attend a vocational program/community college in the US. Admissions to such a program doesn't need knowledge beyond Pre-Calculus/Algebra and basic literacy.
American education really shines at the Tertiary level, which matters more to US competitiveness. We need people to design automation (physical and computational) for existing processes, develop new technologies and processes, and manage said technology and processes.
All that comes from a college education, training programs such as within the armed services, research programs and labs within the federal government, or vocational programs taught by community colleges (which are almost free in most states).
All these educational programs in the US teach and remediate the skills deficiencies that you pointed out at the high school level. A lot of the differnce is also due to the fact that High Schools in the US increasingly don't provide vocational education, whereas Central and Eastern European educational institutes too.
Also, did you go to a vocational high school or a gymnasium equivalent school? In the US, Vocational Education and Gymnasium/College-Track education is clubbed into the same program in high school. To specialize in either a vocational or white collar field, the American system forces you to directly go to some form of tertiary education, whereas in the CEE educational model, you can jump straight into skilled trades after graduating vocational high school.
Based on your username, I'm going to assume you were from Croatia. The Croatian educational model (which is ultimately based on the German model) sorts and places students in White Collar and Blue Collar tracks around Grade 8, with competitive exams to enter Gymnasium (so realistically you start prepping around grade 6 or 7). The North American system (US/Canada/Mexico) doesn't do that until Grade 12.
I did go to gymnasium in Bosnia and Croatia. To your points, some of my friends went to electrical or medical or navigational high schools.
I do find in some states and provinces, there is informal division between schools and formal division inside school - the core curriculum vs advanced curriculum or ap / ib programs. But agree it's not as segregated or pronounced as in Croatia and some other places in Europe. I moved around and studied at 3 universities in North America. Nowhere near top schools but nowhere near bottom either. Average places e.g. University of Toronto. I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting, though there's downsides.
Some school districts do adopt informal tracking (college track, vocational track, normal track) but this is very much at the discretion of the local school district.
IB is occasionally included at local public schools in the US to help drive up rankings because College Board AP classes would require more staffing (3-4 AP physics classes can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB Physics track, and AP Stats/Calc AB/Calc BC can be clubbed into a single 2 year IB SL/HL track. In essence, you can hire 2 teachers with a Masters Degree instead of 4-5 for AP classes just in Physics and Math alone).
> I did not however go to masters or PhD programs. From my friends I understand that's where things finally get interesting
The classes that are 400 levels in a Bachelors program in North America should be comparable to those taught in the first year of a Masters program. Depending on how many credits you came into college with, you may have never had enough free slots open to take those interesting classes.
Second, yours is a true logical statement, but I feel if we are talking of our North American education system as a competitive advantage, then we are inherently talking about comparative and relative performance. Which countries have worse educational system? I can name a few, certainly, but if we look at our economic and geopolitical competitors, how does our education actually compare? Not favourably has always been my impression. I'm curious to see any stats to otherwise, and especially when it comes to efficiency I. E. Money invested vs educational results (understanding measuring educational results is a tricky and controversial area)
Does anybody believe that Russian, Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese Indian etc etc etc (pick a meaningful economic competitor) education is worse than American?
The easy-to-remember alternative would be if (a) you got credits for your AP classes for specific college courses and (b) the faculty was not impressed with your results.
Disagree. I work with a few factories. There are barely any engineers on staff. Needing engineers to service the factory is considered a failure of automation. Instead the factories are maintained by great guys who like doing hands on work but most of them that I know don't even have college degrees. They are just capable of following instructions and basically are the guys who in older times would be fucking around in a machine shop or working on cars.
The engineers who designed the automation are actually from a design and service provider that can troubleshoot the machines remotely and tell the on-site techs what to do. And even that's rare because of the automation is breaking down frequently, you also have a failure of automation.
So I argue education really isn't required for automated factories.
Once the factory is up and running, the engagement of the engineers follows a power law distribution until the failure rate is below whatever is considered acceptable for what you're producing (starting point: 0.1%), at which point the engineers are fully disengaged and fully working on the next product.
Factories do not need engineers on staff other than for reconfiguring space to support producing a new widget and controlling the data flow from stations to whatever central repository exists within the factory confines.
One factory i supported has gone from 2000 workers in 1950 to 200 today, while producing somewhat more than before. The same quality of people are in the factory, but there are a lot less because of automation.
There's ongoing STEM/skilled shortage for existing demand for years. US education system is "great" to small/medium tier countries but not relative to her needs. Even immigration leaching talent from world isn't enough to plug gap so far. IMO overall underperforming and one of the weaker but more resolvable issues.