[spindritf]

> Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!"

My comment boils down to the same point as the blog post: it's very diffiucult to show benefits of any educational intervention, especially long-term benefits. Corollary: it's very hard to be certain that pumping $100M into the City University will have significant positive results.

> think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system

Finland is somewhat exceptional but European educational systems are otherwise on par with the American one[1]. Except for the top/prestigious universities where Americans dominate and only Britons keep up[2].

I both live and vacation in Europe. The popularity of English here has more to do with Anglosphere's cultural domination than it has with the school system. If you want anecdotal evidence, English is my second language and I learnt it primarily from trashy American television on cable and then the Internet.

[1] http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

[2] http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...

[eigenvector]

Have you looked at the methodology for Times Higher Education rankings? It has nothing to do with quality of education. It's based on reputation. I went to a top 20 school that was utterly mediocre and was ranked highly only because of its research prowess.

America having a lot of prestigious research institutions has nothing to do with the quality of primary and secondary education in the country. Half of the PhDs and faculty members in those top American schools got their primary and secondary education in foreign countries.

[eli_gottlieb]

And tertiary, too. Plenty of grad-students in American institutions have their undergrad degree from some cheaper place abroad.

Hell, some of us Americans have left America to go do degrees and careers elsewhere, due to its extreme disinvestment in science. One friend of mine to Montreal and quite possibly Germany for his PhD, me to Israel...

[gu]

Without wanting to sound overly sarcastic, I'd like to point out that if it's "hard be certain" that CUNY would profit from €100m, how can you be certain that the money would benefit Cornell? Heck, following your line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, why don't we just stop funding education altogether?

There is the saying that the US has the world's 50 best universities --- but also the 5,000 worst. While this is an exaggeration, there is quite some truth in it. Just to reiterate my point: if you, as a foreigner, address a bus driver in Oslo in English, he will quite possibly reply in proper English. However, talk to a shopping clerk at Sainsbury's in England, or Target in the US, and you may have to concede that the language they speak is closer to pidgin than English.

Lastly, I'll let you know that I have attended graduate school at a top UK university, a place you have heard of. Interestingly enough, only about a quarter of the grad students were British, and according to the rector this was because many British schools and universities don't educate their students properly. Now you may also know that the UK school system does quite a good job separating the children of the plebs from the children of the rich.

Can you see what I'm getting at? Well, I'll just spell it out for you: a very large part of my fellow students in graduate school earned their undergraduate degree from public universities in Europe, which normally implied the complete absence of tuition fees. Yet, for some reason Britain's own talent found it difficult to compete with them. This mirrors the point another commenter has already made regarding the situation in the US, but since you're from Europe, I thought you might appreciate this perspective.