Education: So, What Matters?

Original thinking is the first casualty of India's Macaulay education. An English obsessed nation of imitators hallucinating about becoming a global power.

Most importantly, the innovators at the helm of an economy come from the top quarter of students. While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well. The “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential,” write Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell in the prestigious journal, Nature, “To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.”
The United States, they find, has among the highest percentage of top-performing students in the world. Some of our best talent comes from other countries. In some ways, the United States steals its way to economic superiority: it rangles the world’s brightest minds to immigrate. The U.S. holds roughly 17% of the world’s International students, compared to 2nd-place Britain (~12%) and far more than education powerhouses, Korea, Switzerland, and Sweden (all below 5%).
“Some of our country’s most iconic brands – including IBM, Google, and Apple – were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. And nearly half of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had at least one immigrant founder,” wrote Aol founder Steve Case. And, our brightest native and immigrant minds are greeted with extraordinary research and economic opportunity. After World War II, the United States emerged as an economic superpower. Massive investment poured into universities and scientific research, which became the genesis for the Internet, itself.

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