The US: number of Nobel prizes too, which is a function of the size of the country and thus its universities and research institutions. The US leads in actual but not per capita research spending, but it's among the top https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_and_development_spending.
It's not a peculiarity of the British social model that one needs a degree to allegedly measure self-worth. North America's enrolment in tertiary education leads the way by a big proportion (84%), followed by Europe and Central Asia (62%), with Sub-Saharan Africa dead last (what else?) at 9% in 2014. But remember, the doubling of university enrolment over the last 20 years was deliberate government policy - yes, graduates are perceived to be more desirable and paid more - and coincided with the insane abandonment of the country's former apprenticeship programme for useless Setas because, I believe, even apprenticeships were considered too 'hard' for poorly educated black candidates.