Can the best universities be found elsewhere?

Power Line reports.

Are American Universities Overrated?

Periodic surveys of higher education around the world usually find American universities dominating the top of the lists. But I wonder whether they deserve this high esteem—especially after the last two weeks.

European and Chinese universities tend to feature more large, rote-learning lecture classes, sometime with as many as 800 students in the lecture hall. That’s not teaching; that’s just a large TED talk. Seminars and interactive discussion are much more rare than on American universities, and the small, private liberal arts teaching college typical of America is mostly unknown in Europe. (The notable overseas exceptions to this are Oxford and Cambridge, which combine large lectures and one-on-one tutorials.)

And worth noting that most European higher education systems, while free, admit far fewer high school graduates into their ranks. If we actually copied the European higher education system faithfully, liberals and the kurrent Korps of Kampus Krazies (the KKK for short—go ahead and use it) would howl with indignation.