The Weibuo quote in the article sums it up. Would you rather have your child go to Tsinghua or MIT? The fact is, MIT remains the most prestigious scientific and engineering school in the world, and number of published articles be damned.<p>Another metric not considered by USNWR is academic freedom. Can students and faculty at Tsinghua use Google? I don&#x27;t think so. No Google Scholar, no Google Books, not even Search. How ridiculous. Without equal access to the Internet, a fair comparison is not possible. And what if a student published an article complaining about lack of access to some internet resources? End of career.<p>That said, this evaluation should be a wake up call to American educators that our formerly great academy has deteriorated, brought down by decades of decaying performance in K-12 and lack of energy and commitment in the universities, where many or most of the science and engineering graduate students are foreign born.