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Why the United States has the best research universities

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Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#221

Post by chrisseaton »

practicalpants wrote: post #190
orbifold wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just factually untrue the GDP of the British empire was much larger than that of the US and in terms of scientific innovation Germany was widely considered to be at the forefront with France and UK as equals. The US was largely a scientific backwater.

I do not know what textbooks you read or economic history lectures you took to reach your conclusion. This is the second half of the 19th C, the US was absolutely dominating the industrial revolution in the era that produced the Carnegies Rockefellers JP Morgans and dozens of others of similar stature. Entire new industries and processes like interchangeable parts, telegraph, petroleum products, railraods, rise of ma…

> It obviously helped the US but already in the early second half of the 19th C America was dominating the industrial revolution, by a wide margin, and had cemented it's place as top GDP (overall and per capita)

If you look it up you can see for yourself that you aren’t saying true things.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7174996.stm

The UK’s GDP per capita was still massively higher than the US’s as late as 1870. It didn’t overtake until 1890.

And the US obviously had a relatively late industrial revolution and adoption of things like railroads because they began in other countries and were imported.

Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#223

Post by [deleted] »

barry-cotter wrote: post #112
User23 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed EU CS grads are on average much stronger scientifically than US ones. With notable exceptions, the typical US undergraduate curriculum is more of a trade school. That’s fine of course, but definitely not the skillset needed for novel research or even properly applying recent research. Edit: Apparently I’ve struck a nerve. But this has been my experience working and hiring at two of the FAANGs. The teams…

> The United States trains the best computer graduates ― by far: We find that CS seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia. The average computer science student in the United States ranks higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India, and Russia. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States similarly outperform seniors in elite institutions in Ch…

[deleted]

Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#224

Post by PartiallyTyped »

chestertn wrote: post #109
User23 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed EU CS grads are on average much stronger scientifically than US ones. With notable exceptions, the typical US undergraduate curriculum is more of a trade school. That’s fine of course, but definitely not the skillset needed for novel research or even properly applying recent research. Edit: Apparently I’ve struck a nerve. But this has been my experience working and hiring at two of the FAANGs. The teams…

I would not say that EU grads are better than American grads or the opposite. They both have different set of skills and strengths. My experience is the following: I’m an European grad but did my PhD in the USA . In Europe tests were brutal and you had no help whatsoever from the professors. Your grade in a course was 80%-100% a single final test and lots of people would fail. Also, professors would not restraint cri…

I am a grad student in a top european university in CS, and tough love has been my experience as well. We have access to the grade distributions and they are steep but not multimodal, with many students failing the first mandatory and notorious courses.

The usually grade depends on a single test, often oral which puts additional burden, plus, to even qualify for the test, students need to achieve well above 50% average on homework assignments.

Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#225

Post by flohofwoe »

jhbadger wrote: post #212
908B64B197 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested by Operation Paperclip [0]. The US was actively looking for key scientific talent in then devastated Germany to bring back home after World War II. This concentration of talent, coupled with intense investments in fundamental research during the Cold War and better living conditions for scientists made it an obvious choice for any academic to relocate to the United States. Even today, the US i…

Although the Soviets had a very similar system (Operation Osoaviakhim) to get German scientists after the war, although less well known (and also a bit less voluntary on the part of the scientists) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim

The Soviet's didn't really know how to properly make use of "their" Germans though, at least for working on concrete projects. Only very few designs of German teams actually made it into production (like the turboprop engines used in the Tu-95: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95), but the Soviets never trusted their Germans enough to really integrate them longterm with Russian teams, instead the goal was to extract the German knowledge as fast as possible and then "dump" them (most German engineers and researchers captured by the Soviets were allowed to return to Germany around the mid- to late-50s, leading to interesting, but ultimately doomed projects like the first German jet airliner Baade 152: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baade_152).

Meanwhile the "American Germans" were welcomed, decided to make the US their new home and contributed heavily to the US space programme.

Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#227

Post by throwastrike »

bernardv wrote: post #141

By what measure are US universities evaluated to be “best” at research? It’s a bold claim to make.

I really don’t think that’s up for a contest. Just MIT and Stanford alone would be considered the best in the world. Now add entities such as the Bell Labs of yesteryears.

Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#228

Post by jltsiren »

raverbashing wrote: post #217
jltsiren wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of a few reasons: In many European countries, the five-year master's is still seen as the primary undergraduate degree, at least in universities. (There may be other more applied institutes with shorter degrees.) When most students are expected to graduate with a master's instead of bachelor's, the program is likely to be more theoretical. Elite schools are a foreign concept in many European countries. In…

> Elite schools are a foreign concept in many European countries The most well known universities in England, France, Germany, Switzerland are what you can call Elite Schools. Yes, even in technical fields like ETH, École Polytechnique in Paris, etc

By elite schools, I mean universities where a substantial part of the value to the students is the brand value and networking with people who can be expected to be particularly successful in the future. The UK has that at Oxbridge and to a lesser degree at other top universities. In France that means some grandes écoles. Germany traditionally didn't have elite schools, with the assumption that all universities are equivalent, but things may be changing. I'm not familiar enough with the Swiss system.

Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#229

Post by hrktb »

WalterBright wrote: post #173
throwaway9980 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is also the explanation for American success in the 20th century. The United States as we know it is, like all empires, built on the spoils of war. The United States was able to capture the best and brightest scientists. These people were brought into a system whose structure and demands were dictated by the needs of a growing government and military. This is the fuel that drove American exceptionalism.

The free market in the US explains it a lot better. (The USSR also captured a lot of German scientists, the results of which were the Soviet successes with rockets and jet aircraft, for example.)

West europe didn't have good options to go to USSR. Politically it was a no-no, going there meant you would be tainted as a spy even if you went back after a while.

So, sure the USSR might not have been stellar, but in the cold war the camps were already cut either way and you didn't choose the US or USSR.

You only chose to stay were you are or go for top entity of your block.

Re: Why the United States has the best research universities

#230

Post by lovemenot »

WalterBright wrote: post #186
zmmmmm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think this factor is vastly under estimated. The US geography is almost the perfect design for building a prosperous and stable society. A massive breadbasket of fertile interior flanked on each side by coastline with access to trade with all corners of the earth but still isolated and highly defensible. Every natural resource you could possibly need available in abundance without ever needing reliance on ext…

Japan has none of this, and yet is highly successful.

At a different scale and time Japan was indeed blessed with natural resources.

In the revised edition of Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond tells us that the "agriculture package" sent from the Fertile Crescent 5kya arrived here late: 2.3kya - perhaps 1,000 years later than expected.

The purported reason: Jomon was perhaps the most sophisticated hunter-gatherer society ever. For instance, pottery was created by Jomon hunter-gatherers earlier than anywhere else.

In part, because of the sheer abundance of natural resources in Japan, the Jomon peoples had developed a rich society that agriculturism for a long time simply couldn't compete with.

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