With no universal healthcare, no free higher education, very little social safety net and a raft of other holes in society to fall through, America is the poster child of “F$$k everyone else, I got mine”
Lack of adequate STEM education in US schools --> more liberal arts majors --> more MBAs --> low value for engineering fundamentals and higher value for financialization --> Oh crap, MBAs can't send stuff to space?
There are an enormous number of physicists who can't find jobs now, the systemic problems are much deeper than that. In fact, I would posit that the "low standards" of highschool STEM relative to countries like India are actually due to the extraordinarily high fraction of our kids we push in that direction.
That was the decision of US elites decades ago. The whole matter becomes a bit clearer if you regard those elites as aristocratic and the US happened to be one of their most fertile lands.
How do you extract value from your land? There are many ways.