I received a master’s degree from Columbia University five years ago and I remember having a conversation with an economic professor there.
He was a very bright guy who had come to the United States as a graduate student from Malaysia after earning his undergraduate degree in England (I think it was at Oxford).
I asked him what he thought of the students in the U.S. in general.
“The United States is a place of extremes,” I remember him saying. “When I came to Princeton for my graduate work, I thought I would run circles around my peers but I encountered a number of brilliant people and professors and I really had to work to keep up. But I also have come across people whose lack of knowledge was staggering.”
His words are ringing after I saw this post in The Atlantic from a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute on America’s supply of science and tech talent that shows when it comes to numbers of high-performing students, we’re doing fine:
But as Jordan Weissmann writes:
If we have so many of the best minds, why are our average scores so disappointingly average? As Rutgers’s Hal Salzman and Georgetown’s B. Lindsay Lowell, who co-authored the EPI report, noted in a 2008 Nature article, our high scorers are balanced out by an very large number of low scorers. Our education system, just like our economy, is polarized.
Click here to read the whole story and the link to the study.
My hunch?
Parents who value education — regardless whether they are single parents or whether they are poor or not — and instill that value in their children make a vast difference.
