As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience.
The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.
I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.
There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).
Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.
However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.
I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters.
But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.
I can only agree. Higher education for the mass is dangerous, especially when there are not enough jobs for them and they have to take a heavy loan to finance their education.
Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be only exacerbated further.
One challenge in this is how to prevent permanent alienation between the masses & high achievers where you separate them at increasingly earlier points of life.
I went to school in a small town where I still shared some non-core classes with the masses, and only had separate tracks for some science/math courses starting at say 13 or 14 years old. But I still had gym/art/homeroom/etc with the masses right until graduation at 18 years old.
The trend has of course been to split the smarter kids out at younger and younger ages.. you see completely separate smart kids schools starting at 14 or 11 years old. You hear stories of pre-K and kindergarten programs that require your kid test in, as if they can asses the intelligence of a 3 year old.
As a society I would observe it makes the masses more resentful & distrusting towards "the elites" and "the elites" more oblivious to what the life for 99% of the country actually entails.
Unfortunately, in my class of students, being good at solving Olympiad level questions did not turn out to be a good predictor of their contributions to society.
Educated voters are manipulated as well, it is just a different kind of manipulation, and in many countries they represent a small part of the electorate.
Do you have any reason to believe you have a good algorithm to predict who these privileged few will be? Anecdotally, I've seen little evidence that being a good student at age X is reason to invest more heavily in that person going forward.
What is more important, raising next generation of Musks (albeit ideally much less broken sociopathic piece of shit as current one), or avoiding next generation of Trumps?
Both of those can add tons of societies (or avoid their downfall), but all of them have 1 in common - they are spoiled rich kids with 0 connection to lives of ordinary folks from Day 1. One of biggest tricks Trump pulled was convincing folks he is one of them, and understands and shares their plight.
So it seems we are already getting at least aome brilliant folks up where they belong, and lower rate of those ain't outright catastrophe for aociety. On the other hand - dumb trivial to manipulate general population can't be saved by producing more smart brilliant folks, populistic corrupt a-holes will still overcome them.
So I would focus on general education level much more, based on above. General prosperity over future trillionaires.
> I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.
Be careful what you wish for.
I understand the sentiment, and I wish we could make education as good as possible for everyone. The problem is, "as good as possible" is still very different for different people. So if you change the system so that everyone learns the same and no concentration of cognitive elites is allowed, it will mean that you have to really slow down the curriculum, to allow the average (and below-average) students to catch up with it. So the smartest kids won't get the best education they can get, and probably not even the kind of education they can get today.
> The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.
I suspect that this is how it probably happened. You were better at math then average, so you were allowed to learn faster than the average. The kid in Denmark who was your equivalent probably had to learn math at the same speed as the average Danish student. That's why they had to wait to learn that kind of math at university.
> There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests
Yes, but it's still a huge waste of time if at school you have the math you already know, and you can only get the better math in the after-school activity; when you could be learning it at school instead.
The practical issue which so many people don't seem to want to acknowledge is that students are different. I have taught and there are some students that simply lack either the intelligence, discipline, interest, or some other aspect that makes it literally impossible for them to ever receive anything beyond a basic education. You could give them 10 on 1 specialized instruction from the the most competent/interesting/engaging teachers and tutors imaginable, and they're still just not going to excel.
And then on the other end of the spectrum there are kids who will proactively read, on their own, through e.g. their math textbook, understand everything with no difficulty, and basically get nothing academic out of their education (beyond that which they'd get from simply having the books) unless one engages in extreme 'differentiation' which is an educational buzzword that is basically just glorified in-class 'filtering' that imposes a massive workload on teachers, creates inequity within the classroom itself, and is really just quite dysfunctional.
And so the typical results of trying to give an advanced education to everyone is that you end up pulling the top down, rather than lifting the bottom up. This is even more true because the bottom is also often disproportionately filled with students who have extreme behavioral problems often alongside families who just don't particularly care about their education, while the top is rarely disruptive except for the smart-ass type who's generally just trying to get some giggles rather than being actively hostile.
---
I think seeing things as a teacher makes you view things radically different than you do as a student. You're probably one of those overachiever types given your comment, and perhaps you feel that you worked a bit harder, maybe were a bit interested in the material then your peers or whatever. But I can assure you - that's generally not it. There are kids that try hard, even some that get things like multiple in-home tutors, and they still just can't excel no matter how hard their parents, or they, try.
---
Edit: Just found this [1] interesting Wiki page. You can see the list of countries, by gold medals in the last 10 Olympiads. In order of medals: USA, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Vietnam, UK, Iran, Canada, Singapore, China.
People talk about intelligence a lot, but the sheer difference in interest is just as big, if not a bigger factor.
In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.
They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.
People are different but the demands of 99% of actual jobs are far below that those natural differences won't matter as opposed to standardized training.
And it's a good thing that it's like that, because we don't want our society to be reliant on a few Rockstars. As Napoleon stated, an individual Mamluk far exceeded an individual Frenchman, but 1000 Frenchman could always defeat 1000 Mamluks.
Here's one issue. Romania has a really lousy motorway system, what there is of it. I gather that corruption has much to do with this apart from construction difficulties involving the Carpathians. As an example there isn't even a motorway between Bucharest and Brasov (88 miles or 141 km apart), the latter being a favorite destination for tourists and wealthy and not-so wealthy second home owners alike. The trip by car either way is usually a nightmare. I should add that Brasov is one of the major towns of Romania not just a tourist attraction.
To the point! The plight of innumerable isolated rural communities trying to attract decent teachers and conditions for their kids is clear to see. Trains don't cut it. General poverty results with knock-on effects.
The teachers will just move to cities with more schools. Qualified workforce too. Rural areas are already depopulated.
Yes, the trip by car to Brasov is quite daunting on a Friday evening or Saturday morning. But infrastructure is getting better thanks to the EU. The politicians learned that motorways with EU and government funds is a great way to get them voted and they created a current account deficit.
Brasov is nice. What's not that nice about it, is brown bears roaming freely at night on the streets. Trivia: was also named after Stalin during stalinism. It also had a Hollywood like sign post cut in the treeline on the main hill with the dictator's name.
A fun fact surprisingly not mentioned in the article, and which I thought would be topical at this time, is that the Romanians apparently love their math olympiads so much that they recently elected as their president an International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) medalist. The current president Nicușor Dan had perfect scores at the IMO both times he participated (one of only 12 students so far with a perfect score in each of their ≥2 participations [1]). In fact at IMO 1988 he was one of only 11 students who solved the famous/notorious “Vieta jumping” problem [2], which eluded even Terence Tao (who, to be fair, was participating at only 13 years old!).
The Wikipedia section of “Notable [IMO] participants” has three sections: “Mathematicians”, “Computer scientists”, and “Other”, with Dan being the sole entry in the last one. :) [3]
Sure, but that's not why he was elected president. Well, not directly.
His Olympiad results led to him getting a doctorate at Sorbonne, which led to him speaking french, which led to impressing Macron who threw France's weight into supporting Dan.
It was a power move to replace the German influence with French influence (previous praesident was ethnic German)
He led a lot of anti corruption efforts for a very long time. (founded USB/USR)
He is smart (as you noted by olympiad, speaking multiple foreign languages)
He is religious as well (pretty important aparently)
All his opponents were much less competent.
A PSD candidate will never be president in a two term election unless the counter candidate is worse (because of iliescu and corruptiob)
The AUR candidate really is a russian puppet and not that smart either, he's mostly there for the 30% vote extremists always get and which were taken by georgescu first time. It's a shame he got far and shows how much influence external actors can have over facebook/tiktok etc.
The USR candidate that managed to squeeze through first time has no charisma and was a backup since Nicusor refused the first time...
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou..., it seems that many neighbouring countries who had similar schooling systems perform similarly or better "per capita" (Hungary with <10M people, placed 5th; Romania 19M at 6th; Bulgaria with <7M at 8th; Serbia at 30th with <8M, Croatia at 42nd with <5M people — two of which should probably get some share of Yugoslavia's medals at 39th — there's also Serbia and Montenegro separately).
So, Romania is at the sweet spot of high selectivity and population size to really pop out in these types of competitions, but it seem it's not really that unique as it's being suggested.
Most kids are overwhelmed by the complexity and volume (homework is brutal) but those few with an aptitude for it thrive and are picked up quickly by teachers looking to mentor them further for local, national and international contests.
That is roughly equivalent to what I did in honors math in the 90s in the US.
Looking over the math curriculum in the same school district today, the current level of instruction doesn't even come close. Standards have sadly fallen.
My grade school education in the US was similar to this (although you needed to qualify for "accelerated" math). There were maybe 90 people every year in this. Those who did well did not make it much past CML or AMC, maybe out of lack of interest. You had to be excellent to move on to Olympiad level maths.
Side note: I have many objections with the competition-ifaction of these things. Not everyone finds their best performance in a competition environment. In CS, maybe we would look at competitive programming and CTFs (arguably CP can be very mathematical). Nonetheless, we use competitions to measure performance, which in some way selects out people who are talented in a setting that isn't a competition, and glorifies people who do play the game.
Having seen what children are capable of, it’s neither overwhelming nor brutal.
What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content. We live in what could be a golden age of thought but for the average kid it’s anything but.
I have to agree with you. Children are adaptable and will rise to the challenge. The west too often prefers to think children are capable of nothing, and have them wallow in an intellectual void.
After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...
I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.
Well, a lot of countries aren't worth leaving. Taking my home of the UK as an example, Wikipedia lists 19 countries with higher GDP per capita, but if I don't want to learn a new language, overcome bureaucratic obstacles and leave my family behind, there is nowhere to go and this criteria describes almost everybody who gets an education here, even the smart ones. Romania is #53 on the list and their EU membership means they can emigrate easily.
I believe the original intent of such Olympiads was to test how pupils equipped with only standard school education would tackle non-standard puzzles. Eventually this turned into pupils attending special schools, having coaches, doing such non-standrdad puzzles all day long during their studies in order to win medals. A leetcode grind all the way down.
I think it's the other way round. There were special schools or special groups in regular schools that prepared Soviet children to STEM careers by making them solve a lot of puzzles. Then IMO appeared on top of that to celebrate highest achievers
The Olympics were originally founded on the principle of amateurism, on grassroots, individual passion and love of the sport, not as a career or life achievement.
To see what's its become today, especially how some suffer greatly to get the gold medal is depressing, if not disgusting when all of this are ultimately trivial activities. They were supposed to be a unifying reprieve from the real issues of the 20th century, not another stage of brutal national competition.
The education system is stratified, keeping high-achieving students together, promoting them to schools with good teachers, etc.
OK, so then why don't the situations given in the elaborate description then show up in the statistics, like the "fat right tail" that isn't there?
It's because the students sent to olympiads are statistical outliers, too few in number to skew statistics. The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
I wonder if national averages actually matter very much beyond being a vanity statistic? While it's good to have a generally more mathematically capable population, you would expect most actual "progress" (papers, discoveries, things built) to be made by the outliers.
I guess there's another layer tho in 2025 where, assuming they are rational, you wouldn't necessarily expect their efforts to benefit Romania.
In a global economy I think a good national average is more important than the peaks. The genius invention will spread, and there is significant value in having a population which can utilise it.
As another example, if cancer is cured tomorrow it won't necessarily be the country which found the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most competent doctors, able to use and apply the cure.
Yes, a numerate population as assessed by national averages matters. A more numerate population reasons better about economic policies and may vote more wisely. Numeracy is closely tied to the ability to work in a variety of occupations. If we consider probability and statistics, the implications are especially salient.
Idiot author aside, even if the students were outliers being sent to the Olympiad, that would not explain the consistent performance over decades. Relative to the size of the country, and compared to the other dominant nations, the outliers seem disproportionate.
> The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
This is the usual argument against stratified education systems but is it proven in any way? My experience with stratified systems is that they increase both high quantiles and the average. Maybe (even if not established), maybe they reduce low quantiles like the 0.1th, but very unlikely they damage the average. Quite the opposite.
It's kind of like this idea that communism makes an average citizen richer which sounds logical, but in the end everyone's poorer. Remove the stratification and there's no incentive to do anything.
The figure in the article claims to show that this is indeed the case -- though as I noted in my other comments, the y axis is actually uninterpretable ("percentiles" can't be negative).
"Because Romania is a member state of the European Union, the people the country has put great effort into training and credentialing are easily able to leave the country and acquire jobs elsewhere"
and
"free movement of talent between countries, Romania ends up subsidizing talent discovery for other countries with less apt educational systems"
Are pretty negative stances.
UE is a union, so it's a pretty different situation than students leaving eg third world country to come to Europe. And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania. I hope such phenomenon progressively average the situation between UE countries and closes the gaps that may currently exist.
> And the migration exists in the other direction, you'll be amazed by how many French dentists are studying in Romania.
Those people don't really plan to stay in Romania. They intend to get their degrees then move back to Western Europe. Hell, most of my former high-school colleagues who became doctors or dentists, emigrated to Western Europe.
The EU echoes the SU, sadly. Central government, central planning, central banks, mix people, no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities, flatten the social structures, and most importantly, destroy the family unit. Young couples can't buy a house and can't afford to raise kids. And young Europeans face high unemployment and low wages for life-consuming jobs with not much career prospects.
Remote work would've lessen that. But it seems they didn't like it so they quickly rolled it back after the pandemic.
This is just plain wrong or a terrible misinterpretation...
> central banks
What are you trying to say here? Each member state has a central bank. They are independent from, coordinated by, the ECB. Each central bank assumes the responsibility of regulating the member state's banks, with the ECB paying close attention to system-critical banks.
The US also has a central bank, singular, the Fed.
What's your point?
> no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities
Have you been to Europe? Each country has it's own, completely distinct culture based on the nation's historic identity. Hint: you know when you're crossing borders (the language usually changes).
I wonder if you can blame the climate and geography as some do in America. Bucharest is hot and sweaty in the summer (avg high 30 C, avg 68% rel H2O) and cold and snowy in the winter. The city lies on a flat plain, far from the mountains or the sea. Then you give people the opportunity to move to Amsterdam or Milan. Plus many other European countries have great infrastructure built up decades ago while Romania was undergoing economic crisis and revolution. It's hard to catch up.
The root of the issue might be that free migration in the age of modern transportation requires a shared tax base.
The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.
I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.
There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).
Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.
However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.
But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.
Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be only exacerbated further.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa...
I went to school in a small town where I still shared some non-core classes with the masses, and only had separate tracks for some science/math courses starting at say 13 or 14 years old. But I still had gym/art/homeroom/etc with the masses right until graduation at 18 years old.
The trend has of course been to split the smarter kids out at younger and younger ages.. you see completely separate smart kids schools starting at 14 or 11 years old. You hear stories of pre-K and kindergarten programs that require your kid test in, as if they can asses the intelligence of a 3 year old.
As a society I would observe it makes the masses more resentful & distrusting towards "the elites" and "the elites" more oblivious to what the life for 99% of the country actually entails.
Educated voters are manipulated as well, it is just a different kind of manipulation, and in many countries they represent a small part of the electorate.
Both of those can add tons of societies (or avoid their downfall), but all of them have 1 in common - they are spoiled rich kids with 0 connection to lives of ordinary folks from Day 1. One of biggest tricks Trump pulled was convincing folks he is one of them, and understands and shares their plight.
So it seems we are already getting at least aome brilliant folks up where they belong, and lower rate of those ain't outright catastrophe for aociety. On the other hand - dumb trivial to manipulate general population can't be saved by producing more smart brilliant folks, populistic corrupt a-holes will still overcome them.
So I would focus on general education level much more, based on above. General prosperity over future trillionaires.
Be careful what you wish for.
I understand the sentiment, and I wish we could make education as good as possible for everyone. The problem is, "as good as possible" is still very different for different people. So if you change the system so that everyone learns the same and no concentration of cognitive elites is allowed, it will mean that you have to really slow down the curriculum, to allow the average (and below-average) students to catch up with it. So the smartest kids won't get the best education they can get, and probably not even the kind of education they can get today.
> The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.
I suspect that this is how it probably happened. You were better at math then average, so you were allowed to learn faster than the average. The kid in Denmark who was your equivalent probably had to learn math at the same speed as the average Danish student. That's why they had to wait to learn that kind of math at university.
> There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests
Yes, but it's still a huge waste of time if at school you have the math you already know, and you can only get the better math in the after-school activity; when you could be learning it at school instead.
And then on the other end of the spectrum there are kids who will proactively read, on their own, through e.g. their math textbook, understand everything with no difficulty, and basically get nothing academic out of their education (beyond that which they'd get from simply having the books) unless one engages in extreme 'differentiation' which is an educational buzzword that is basically just glorified in-class 'filtering' that imposes a massive workload on teachers, creates inequity within the classroom itself, and is really just quite dysfunctional.
And so the typical results of trying to give an advanced education to everyone is that you end up pulling the top down, rather than lifting the bottom up. This is even more true because the bottom is also often disproportionately filled with students who have extreme behavioral problems often alongside families who just don't particularly care about their education, while the top is rarely disruptive except for the smart-ass type who's generally just trying to get some giggles rather than being actively hostile.
---
I think seeing things as a teacher makes you view things radically different than you do as a student. You're probably one of those overachiever types given your comment, and perhaps you feel that you worked a bit harder, maybe were a bit interested in the material then your peers or whatever. But I can assure you - that's generally not it. There are kids that try hard, even some that get things like multiple in-home tutors, and they still just can't excel no matter how hard their parents, or they, try.
---
Edit: Just found this [1] interesting Wiki page. You can see the list of countries, by gold medals in the last 10 Olympiads. In order of medals: USA, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Vietnam, UK, Iran, Canada, Singapore, China.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_cou...
In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.
They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.
And it's a good thing that it's like that, because we don't want our society to be reliant on a few Rockstars. As Napoleon stated, an individual Mamluk far exceeded an individual Frenchman, but 1000 Frenchman could always defeat 1000 Mamluks.
Dead Comment
To the point! The plight of innumerable isolated rural communities trying to attract decent teachers and conditions for their kids is clear to see. Trains don't cut it. General poverty results with knock-on effects.
The teachers will just move to cities with more schools. Qualified workforce too. Rural areas are already depopulated.
Yes, the trip by car to Brasov is quite daunting on a Friday evening or Saturday morning. But infrastructure is getting better thanks to the EU. The politicians learned that motorways with EU and government funds is a great way to get them voted and they created a current account deficit.
Brasov is nice. What's not that nice about it, is brown bears roaming freely at night on the streets. Trivia: was also named after Stalin during stalinism. It also had a Hollywood like sign post cut in the treeline on the main hill with the dictator's name.
The Wikipedia section of “Notable [IMO] participants” has three sections: “Mathematicians”, “Computer scientists”, and “Other”, with Dan being the sole entry in the last one. :) [3]
[1]: http://imo-official.org/hall.aspx?column=perfectscores&order...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vieta_jumping&old...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Internati...
His Olympiad results led to him getting a doctorate at Sorbonne, which led to him speaking french, which led to impressing Macron who threw France's weight into supporting Dan.
It was a power move to replace the German influence with French influence (previous praesident was ethnic German)
He is popular, he was elected mayor of Bucharest.
He led a lot of anti corruption efforts for a very long time. (founded USB/USR)
He is smart (as you noted by olympiad, speaking multiple foreign languages)
He is religious as well (pretty important aparently)
All his opponents were much less competent.
A PSD candidate will never be president in a two term election unless the counter candidate is worse (because of iliescu and corruptiob)
The AUR candidate really is a russian puppet and not that smart either, he's mostly there for the 30% vote extremists always get and which were taken by georgescu first time. It's a shame he got far and shows how much influence external actors can have over facebook/tiktok etc.
The USR candidate that managed to squeeze through first time has no charisma and was a backup since Nicusor refused the first time...
So what else is left?
So, Romania is at the sweet spot of high selectivity and population size to really pop out in these types of competitions, but it seem it's not really that unique as it's being suggested.
Most kids are overwhelmed by the complexity and volume (homework is brutal) but those few with an aptitude for it thrive and are picked up quickly by teachers looking to mentor them further for local, national and international contests.
Looking over the math curriculum in the same school district today, the current level of instruction doesn't even come close. Standards have sadly fallen.
Side note: I have many objections with the competition-ifaction of these things. Not everyone finds their best performance in a competition environment. In CS, maybe we would look at competitive programming and CTFs (arguably CP can be very mathematical). Nonetheless, we use competitions to measure performance, which in some way selects out people who are talented in a setting that isn't a competition, and glorifies people who do play the game.
What’s truly brutal is acquiescing to children droning away their youth mindlessly clicking meaningless games or watching vacuous streaming content. We live in what could be a golden age of thought but for the average kid it’s anything but.
Both of these things are droning. One is just culturally acceptable. Don't think so? Stop by your local Kumon center some time.
After all the talk in the article how the Romanian system makes part of the population perform higher by throwing a lot of the resources at them, lowering the performance of the people that are already below average. Which is a problem for Romania because a lot of the highly educated people leave the country afterwards ...
I was not really prepared for the final sentence where the author recommends as a solution that more countries should do it like that.
To see what's its become today, especially how some suffer greatly to get the gold medal is depressing, if not disgusting when all of this are ultimately trivial activities. They were supposed to be a unifying reprieve from the real issues of the 20th century, not another stage of brutal national competition.
OK, so then why don't the situations given in the elaborate description then show up in the statistics, like the "fat right tail" that isn't there?
It's because the students sent to olympiads are statistical outliers, too few in number to skew statistics. The system acts to identify and foster them, but to the detriment of national averages.
I guess there's another layer tho in 2025 where, assuming they are rational, you wouldn't necessarily expect their efforts to benefit Romania.
As another example, if cancer is cured tomorrow it won't necessarily be the country which found the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most competent doctors, able to use and apply the cure.
This is the usual argument against stratified education systems but is it proven in any way? My experience with stratified systems is that they increase both high quantiles and the average. Maybe (even if not established), maybe they reduce low quantiles like the 0.1th, but very unlikely they damage the average. Quite the opposite.
It's kind of like this idea that communism makes an average citizen richer which sounds logical, but in the end everyone's poorer. Remove the stratification and there's no incentive to do anything.
The figure in the article claims to show that this is indeed the case -- though as I noted in my other comments, the y axis is actually uninterpretable ("percentiles" can't be negative).
Those people don't really plan to stay in Romania. They intend to get their degrees then move back to Western Europe. Hell, most of my former high-school colleagues who became doctors or dentists, emigrated to Western Europe.
Remote work would've lessen that. But it seems they didn't like it so they quickly rolled it back after the pandemic.
> central banks
What are you trying to say here? Each member state has a central bank. They are independent from, coordinated by, the ECB. Each central bank assumes the responsibility of regulating the member state's banks, with the ECB paying close attention to system-critical banks.
The US also has a central bank, singular, the Fed. What's your point?
> no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities
Have you been to Europe? Each country has it's own, completely distinct culture based on the nation's historic identity. Hint: you know when you're crossing borders (the language usually changes).
The root of the issue might be that free migration in the age of modern transportation requires a shared tax base.