Compare Unicamp or USP curriculum to any major US university if you have to, they will be pretty interesting. The Ivy league universities are a ridiculous small pool of all universities in US. I like Feynman but there's idiocy in assuming his observations from more than forty years ago as the whole truth for all graduation courses in the country.
What US has in superior is the mentoring culture, the business people interwoven in the university culture (like the extra courses offered in Sloan with real companies!), the sharp focus on patent, other things. But technical knowledge in top Brazilian universities will compete or outclass technical knowledge in US. But there are many things important, supporting things, a whole infrastructure beyond the technical people required to advanced technology.
It's not idiocy. Everything he wrote about education in Brazil, I experienced first hand. Even if what you said is true, curriculum comparisons don't invalidate my experience.
The most demoralizing thing was the phoniness. The pointlessness of it all. Everybody was just going through the motions. The only thing people wanted to know was the exact sequence of steps they had to follow in order to achieve success. Everybody here knows you have to go to school in order to not be a nobody. So everyone goes to school. It barely matters what field they pick, anything will do. The more prestigious the better. People go to these places and they study crap they don't actually care about because it's all just a means to an end.
I was constantly surrounded by people who I felt didn't actually enjoy computers as much as I did. Made me so disillusioned I chose to do something else with my life. I just couldn't bear to be around people like that anymore.
Probably. I don't really know anything about american education so it's not wise for me to comment. I do have this perception that software is suffering from that problem worldwide though. People used to study this stuff because they liked computers, now everyone is learning to code because they want the comfortable rich programmer lifestyle. It just feels soulless to me.
My experience has been that the ceiling is highest in the US but that the floor is significantly higher in a number of other countries. And I say this as someone who chose to leave a Top 10 US uni to do undergrad in the UK and grad in UK/Japan, so I’m not particularly inclined towards the US model.
What US has in superior is the mentoring culture, the business people interwoven in the university culture (like the extra courses offered in Sloan with real companies!), the sharp focus on patent, other things. But technical knowledge in top Brazilian universities will compete or outclass technical knowledge in US. But there are many things important, supporting things, a whole infrastructure beyond the technical people required to advanced technology.