[Will_Do]

This is something I never considered. I always assumed that the main reason US software engineers are better paid is there is a (perceived? real?) benefit to being close to businesspeople / close to the customers / close to the culture / some other benefit that depends solely on geography. I did not think that the quality of education could be a significant driver. This paper opens that possibility.

The elite schools are especially striking. I would have never guessed that CS students from Stanford/MIT would be so substantially better than students from Tsingua/Bombay. These schools draw from vastly larger talent pools (1.4 billion and 1.2 billion) than US undergrad programs. According to the study, the results do not materially change when only native English speakers are considered.

It’s worth investigating if the exams are biased in some way but if this holds up to scrutiny, it will change my views on American Universities significantly.

[doctorpangloss]

It seems pretty obvious, if everyone's trying to send their kids to get higher-educated here in the US, and they're pretty smart, maybe it's for a good reason?

I mean not everything is as reductionist as vanity or brain drain. That seems to be the totally uninspired analysis from other commenters. It may be that there are equally smart students everywhere, but actually you get the best education here, and why?

One answer is that less conformity, greater social and political freedoms, and greater economic resources all let students reach their potential better.

A nuanced view would look at what it means, really, to feel stifled at a university where you’re guaranteed to have been at the top of your class but still not know important near-history or enjoy free speech. Maybe conformity crops up in the quality of professors more so than the students. It’s really complex but I know maybe only a few Tsinghua grads and all of them continued their educations here.

So my perspective is limited by the fact that I’ve never interacted with very many people who are strictly foreign educated in 2019 born after 1990.

[AstralStorm]

I think the combination of best in the field being in academia, enough but not too much drive for results and a bit of nonconformity is the key. Also good funding not driving the best out of education system.

For instance, in Poland (and Russia too), education is grossly underfunded so the volume and drive are low, while South Korea has a bit too much conformity in their system, producing great engineers but not as great basic research.

[tgb]

Well, they're tracking the location of the university not the nationality of the student and the absolute best students go to MIT/Stanford even if they're from outside the US. I haven't read the paper but the article here says:

> But the researchers corrected for this by separating out anyone who didn't list English as their native language; the gap was unaffected.

But this only corrects for half the equation; it removes foreign students from elite US institutions but does not "add them back" to their home country's results. Tsinghua may have a gap of students that went to Stanford instead. Though I'm a little skeptical that this accounts for much of the effect. China and India have too many top students for the US to steal enough of them to effect the outcome this severely and it's unlikely the test is able to separate the one-in-a-million students from the one-in-a-thousand stduents.

[Will_Do]

The subjects quizzed are on page 9 in [this pdf](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2019/03/12/181464611...) seems pretty general.

[mamcx]

Teachers.

This is the thing most overlook when talk about good education.