[jcranmer]

You make a big deal about how secondary school rankings show that Americans are idiots and use that to guess that university rankings should similarly show that American universities are poor quality.

Which is obviously why only 12 of the top 25 schools, and 4 of the top 4, are American. I'd cite the logic failures in your argument as well, but I think letting actual statistics speak for themselves works better. And FWIW, I'm citing the university rankings that's published by a non-US publisher lest you think it's merely patriotic bias.

[bjourne]

Secondary school rankings show Americans are below the average. I never claimed that the quality of the alumni correlated with the quality of the school. The GP did. My point is that if you want to rank schools by how smart their students are, then no American institution would rank in the top 10. So you need to find a better metric if you want to claim that MIT is best of the best.