23/09/2013: Dániel Léderer, CEO and co-founder of the Milestone Institute, gave an interview to the Hungarian newsportal 444.hu. The full text can be found here (in Hungarian).
Why is a foreign education better than a Hungarian one?
Many Hungarian secondary schools are extraordinary; 18-year-old Hungarian students are several years ahead of their peers from other nations. But after university, they lose this advantage and they fall behind.
Universities abroad have more money. Is that why they are better?
Partly. Naturally, the Hungarian schools cannot pay the world’s leading teachers, but in itself this does not matter; anyone can download a Noam Chomsky lecture from the Internet. Their philosophy makes the difference. They do not accept huge numbers of students in the first year just to kick many of them out later; they only admit the ones who really want to study. This results in smaller classes, which matter a lot in terms of educational quality. Additionally, in today’s constantly changing world they are teaching their students skills instead of trying to impress a certain vocation on them, educating them to be open-minded and to how to locate the information they need. They are also more involved in the life of the student community because for employers, being the editor of the Harvard Crimson or the head of the rowing team means that the candidate knows how to accomplish something in life.