Why aren’t Asian universities the best in the world?
You mean ChiCom, or Asian? There is a big difference.
If current trends are an indication, you will not be asking that question a generation from now.
A lot are very good but all lack the prestige of American or British schools. If you want to be a competent engineer they fill the bill but international recognition only comes from America or Europe. As well, the English skill are essential in the international markets. I have nieces and nephews educated in Thailand and one went on to grad school at MIT but that’s out of the reach of most economically. He Wes sponsored by his Thai employer.
As we make college more “affordable” the quality of education even at our most elite private schools will continue to tank and China, India, South Korea and even Vietnam will probably be surpassing us in terms of how good their schools are. Especially now that some of their universities may be moving away from the purely rote computation style that held some of them back.
The football programs stink :)
They might be. The way colleges are currently ranked, by professors, significant weight is attached to research published by academics at that college. Since American colleges receive massive amounts of government grant money, American academics publish the most research, unlike their Asian brethren, which are run as educational rather than research institutions. But the reality is that elite American colleges produce mostly drones, like everybody else. Bill Gates was a college dropout. As was Steve Jobs. Jony Ive went to trade school. In England. Sam Walton never even went to college. Home Depot's Bernard Marcus and Arthur Blank graduated from Rutgers and Babson respectively with generic undergrad degrees, not exactly the beneficiary of esoteric Fed-funded research. Bottom line is that these rankings are illusory with respect to how much value-added they contribute to the raw materials (i.e. students) processed through.
We shouldn't kid ourselves. Take out our raw materials endowment (abundant fertile land, oil, minerals, lumber, coal, et al) and we end up with Japan's GDP per capita. And this is after two decades of Japanese stagnation.