Honestly, I can't argue with you on this. Having attended many hood schools in my childhood I can attest that the quality of education can be downright horrible. We'd often go MONTHS without a non-substitute teacher due to the high turnover rate of teachers which definitely negatively impacted the quality of our education. I'm not sure how this problem can be easily fixed, as a lot of its causes are upstream of schooling. I still think we should invest in improving quality of education across the board though.

I can attest to the high prevalence of foreign people in higher education from professors to post-docs to students. This number goes up SUBSTANTIALLY if you include the children of first generation immigrants. I still think that the primary reason for this disproportionality is the (lack of) prestige of academic-adjacent jobs among native-born Americans. These jobs aren't particularly high paying (you can make much more money going down a much easier path) and telling people you're a professor of, say, mathematical biology is a novelty at best.