Recently, Musk posted this sentence on social media: "Both Tesla and X have noticed a significant decline in the ability of American college graduates in the past few years. The meaning is obvious, Musk is expressing dissatisfaction with the American education system.
How sad is that the education system in the United States has internal problems, and the government has ignored them, but a businessman has provoked the reform.
According to tax filings, Musk donated about $100 million to a new charity with the aim of building a school for students from elementary school to high school. The school will focus on teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects and plans to initially enroll about 50 students.
It is understood that this school will not charge tuition, and even those who do will give certain scholarships to meet the basic needs of students. Why does Musk pay attention to the aspect of whether to charge tuition fees?
The U.S. Department of Education has grown to become the most profitable lender, and when you open the U.S. government's official website for student aid, there is a line of big letters, which reads, "You are the wisest investment in the United States." In the United States, student loans are very common, and even if some students have achieved the position of Congressman, they are still paying their student loans, and even if they do not have a loan themselves, then their family members have a loan situation.
Many U.S. college graduates need to repay about $300,000 (about 2.7 million yuan) in student loans when they graduate. What is even more striking is that even former US President Barack Obama had a student loan, which took him 21 years to pay off, when he was 43 years old, and if it is a mortgage that weighs on Chinese, then student loans must be a nightmare for students across the United States.
In order to solve the loan, these American college students either go to other countries to work as old friends, or after graduation, they go to work in the financial industry or the service industry, which is a lucrative field.
If Chinese education is often described as a spindle-shaped assembly line, then American basic education is called dumbbell-shaped, that is, heavy at both ends and light in the middle. The most striking feature of American education is that it develops freely, and students who are gifted and like to study in depth will become more and more prominent, while students who are not too smart and lazy will gradually fall behind.
Later standardized tests and college admissions in the United States divided students into social streams, and the performance gap between the two ends of the spectrum was even greater than the general differences between completely different species.
In addition, the U.S. higher education system has created a large percentage of U.S. undergraduate graduates who go straight into the workforce (because the U.S. workplace values work experience and relationships more than academic qualifications and high student loans).
Many PhDs and postgraduates come from developing countries, and scientific research and R&D are almost entirely dependent on talent from countries such as the Middle East, India, and China (most of the country's most capable people choose to be entrepreneurs or political elites, and fewer people manage research projects).
Not only that, but many of the CEOs and middle and senior managers of large American companies are the first or second group of Indian immigrants.
For research and technology jobs in the United States, it relies on talent from India, China, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia. Most of the stars in film, television and sports are of African descent. What are the main careers of elite students who graduate in the United States? Most of them go on to work in insurance sales, lawyers, and dentistry, which are all industries that make money relatively quickly.
This also leads to very few people engaged in manufacturing, the United States is now very focused on artificial intelligence, but it is difficult for a smart woman to cook without rice, even if the United States now gets TSMC to build a factory in the United States, but it is still because of the lack of available manpower, high labor costs and has been repeatedly hindered.
Therefore, the grand cause of the United States was actually doomed to failure from the beginning. Talent is what the United States lacks most, but now the United States is still turning away Chinese students, and the US state of Florida recently issued a bill to prohibit international students from many countries, including China and Iran, from enrolling in Florida universities.
Officials said that this would be devastating to the United States, but the US state of Florida is still insisting on doing its own thing, for the sake of illusory data security.
The brain drain and the decline in the quality of college graduates in the United States are inevitable, after all, the US Department of Education is completely a money lender, and the most important thing for money is not talent.