The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [90]
A 2006 report from the London-based Centre for European Reform, “The Future of European Universities,” points out that the United States invests 2.6 percent of its GDP in higher education, compared with 1.2 percent in Europe and 1.1 percent in Japan. The situation in the sciences is particularly striking. A list of where the world’s 1,000 best computer scientists were educated shows that the top ten schools are all American. U.S. spending on R&D remains higher than Europe’s, and its collaborations between business and educational institutions are unmatched anywhere in the world. America remains by far the most attractive destination for students, taking 30 percent of the total number of foreign students globally. All these advantages will not be erased easily, because the structure of European and Japanese universities—mostly state-run bureaucracies—is unlikely to change. And while China and India are opening new institutions, it is not that easy to create a world-class university out of whole cloth in a few decades. Here’s a statistic about engineers that you might not have heard. In India, universities graduate between 35 and 50 Ph.D.’s in computer science each year; in America, the figure is 1,000.
Learning to Think
If American universities are first-rank, few believe that the same can be said about its schools. Everyone knows that the American school system is in crisis and that its students do particularly badly in science and math, year after year, in international rankings. But the statistics here, while not wrong, reveal something slightly different. America’s real problem is one not of excellence but of access. Since its inception in 1995, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has become the standard for comparing educational programs across nations. The most recent results, from 2007, put the United States in the middle of the pack. The United States beat the average score of the forty-eight countries included in the study, but many of the countries ranked below it were developing nations like Morocco, Tunisia, and Armenia. Eighth-graders did better than fourth-graders (the two grades measured) but still lagged behind their counterparts in countries like Holland, Japan, and Singapore. The media report such news with a predictable penchant for direness: “Economic time bomb: U.S. teens are among worst at math,” declared the Wall Street Journal after the previous TIMSS study, in 2003, which revealed similar results.
But even if the U.S. scores in math and science fall well below leaders like Singapore and Hong Kong, the aggregate scores hide deep regional, racial, and socioeconomic variation. Poor and minority students score well below the American average, while, as one study noted, “students in affluent suburban U.S. school districts score nearly as well as students in Singapore, the runaway leader on TIMSS math scores.”16 These are the students who then go on to compete for and fill the scarce slots in America’s top universities. The difference between average science scores in poor and wealthy school districts within the United States, for instance, is four to five times greater than the difference between the U.S. and Singaporean national averages. In other words, America is a large and diverse country with a real inequality problem. This will, over time, translate into a competitiveness problem, because if we cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, it will drag down the country. But we do know what works. The large cohort of students in the top fifth of American schools rank along with the world