Looks like we should teach kids Russian so they can try to get into the best college for programming:
https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/05/students-place-third-in-international-programming-contest
The US did not fare too well it seems…at least not as well as many would have expected.
This doesn’t look like a great judgement of a school’s quality - a few people from one school doing one competition is hardly a proper analysis. Also, Harvard is hardly the top CS school in the US - this would seem to imply that it’s the bar for the US.
On top of that, two teams from both Russia and the US were in the Top 6. Doesn’t seem like the US underperformed really.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case anyways. But who knows.
Regardless, sending someone to Russia for CS over a top CS school would be silly if they wanted to work in the US - locality is much more important in the industry.
I don’t think this article gives you much to conclude on anything…
The strength of Russian education is mostly in that it has a much more consistent and higher level of learning in grade school, which leads to obviously better prepared college students. For university bound students, a curriculum that would be broadly equivalent to all AP classes is essentially the norm. There are a few differences in specific focuses by topic, but that is easily remedied. US K-12 education is notoriously inconsistent in its outcomes.
At the university level, the US isn’t behind at all. Comparing which is better would be a useless exercise, but the US university system is as good as anything anywhere in the world.
Programming? Yeah you should probably teach your kids Russian. Most U.S. Universities don’t offer programming degrees.