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Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

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In terms of reputation, name recognition, notable people who come out of them, publishers of leading research, and advancers of technology? If you looked at a list of the top 20 I would bet more than half are in the US.

Many of those people are imported from foreign universities. If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable.

> If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable

Education quality at most top universities is middling, they’re designed for smart people who will reach for knowledge. Being around the best people drained from around the world provides fertile ground for that.

Yes but there's two parts to this: the teachers and the students. The student body in top American universities (especially undergrad) wouldn't even make the wait-list in a fair number of European schools.

The ability to fund research and attract the best researchers (not necessarily educators) is useful at education's high-end, which is why many come to the USA in the first place. It isn't so great for standard or remedial education, however.

> educational quality, it's questionable.

Virtually anyone at a top tier university would be 100% capable of learning their material and making good grades on it with the textbook alone. Combined with online resources, even easier. The quality of instruction isn't all that important for these schools, it's the decisions around which material to present and how to present it, which they can do because they attract the best talent.

What do you know? You’re claiming something else but framing it as fact. You don’t know anything!

Care to elaborate? I know I'd been making the same assumption about American universities - Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford do seem to represent a good share of the world's best universities.

In terms of research, it's been roughly true since WWII. Persecution by the Nazis and the war drove the cream of the European scientific establishment to the US, and the US poured a large amount of government funding into science funding after the war. Things are changing, first because the European scientific community has recovered and also because scientific research has been taking off in Asia.

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