Cons of American Education (Part 1)

The education system in the US has the potential to be the best in the world. However we still have a long way to go from good to great! There are many things our educators and leaders can learn from countries like India, China, and Japan.

As a high school student I had the privilege of attending one of the best public schools in New York City. To do so I had to take an entrance exam not unlike the SATs. The irony here is American students are notoriously bad test takers compared to Asian students. In fact about 50% of the students who attended Brooklyn Technical High School are Asian.This percentage has only gotten larger in the years since I graduated. Asian students are over represented in the best high schools and colleges in the US even though they are only 4.5% of the population here, because Asian students are simply better at math and science.

(This was taken from a article by Jeff Yang) "UC Berkeley, considered by many to be the best public university in the nation, and perhaps the world, is currently 41 percent Asian, a proportion that’s over three times higher than the percentage of Asian Americans in the California population, and almost 10 times higher than the percentage of Asians in the U.S. And Berkeley is just one example among many; along the bottom of the article runs a ticker-style strip recounting the Asian American percentage on top college campuses across the nation, from 13 percent at Princeton to 27 percent at Wellesley, 17 percent at University of Texas – Austin, and 27 percent at M.I.T."

 There is also a large disparity in the American schooling system. Some schools, like mine, get a lot of funding, and the best teachers. These schools also get the best colleges recruiting their students. At the other end of the spectrum, there are some schools where students don't have proper textbooks, corruption in the school board is rampant, and the teachers are jaded or just plain lazy. More commonly schools are mediocre.This has created students who are lacking in many ways.


I only got into Brooklyn Tech because my math are reading skills were better than the average. I credit my Indian education for giving me this advantage. One of the things American students lack is a well rounded Math and Science background. This is a systemic problem in the US from kindergarten to College, causing fewer Americans choose carriers in fields like Science and Engineering, the very things that this country used to boast as its greatest strength.

Take my discipline for example, Mechanical Engineering. There is a growing vacuum that is being created as baby boomers decide to retire. To fill the vacuum employers are forced to hire people from India and China whose population is highly technical. All of my cousins in India have some form of engineering degree. Engineering positions are one of the highest paid positions in this country and Americans can't even qualify to apply for these positions because they simply lack the skills.

Please refer to the following article in the New York Times. Little Asia on the Hill.

Pros of Education in the USA (Part 1)

Lately the US education system has come under heavy fire due to various failures. However I would like to argue that the idea itself is a good one, it's the implementation that is lacking. I would like to describe my high school experience which is a great example of success.

After finishing eight grade in India, I moved to New York City  with my family in April of 1999.  I was just in time to be eligible to take a test to qualify to get into one of the three top high schools in NYC. I got into Brooklyn Technical High which is the third best school in NYC. Freshman(9th) and Sophomore(10th) years were fairly routine. I had to take Math, Science, English, History. I ended up getting easy As in the Math and Science classes because I had already learned a lot of it in India.  However, I was struggling in my Social Studies and English classes. This was because I was no longer tested on how well I could regurgitate facts on a test.

We had to take two years of  World History. My first world history project was the New York Times Project. I had to pick a region of the world, and collect twenty articles about my chosen region from the New York Times (FYI, I still read this newspaper everyday). Then write an essay by taking the twenty articles and tie current events to history. I got a 65% (barely passing) on this project because I had never written an essay that made me think about historical context. But I learned a lot about Europe (my chosen region).To this day I am compelled to think of history when I listen, watch, or read the news. If gives me an appreciation for the butterfly effect.