Re: Solutions
" and facilities are state of the art, (60,000 or 70,000 seater stadiums for american football)."
Think bigger.
University of Georgia has a 92,746 seater stadium (that's bigger than Wembley or any in the UK) in a town the size of Exeter (about 100,000 residents, 1/3 of them students). UF (the university here) is only slightly smaller than Wembley (90,000) with a capacity of 55,548.
Also having stadiums bigger than Wembley are Louisianna State (92,542), UCLA (92,542), University of Southern California (93,607), then there's Soccer City in johannasburg, Camp Nou in Barcelona, and the Iranian national stadium, and the Melbourne Cricket ground (which takes us over the 100k seats line). Ready for more US Universities? University of Texas at Austin (100,119), University of Alabama (101,821), Ohio State University (102,329), University of Tennesee (102,455), [Mexico national stadium, 105k], Penn State University (106,572) and finally University of Michigan (109,901)
There's only two bigger in the world, one in India (Salt Lake Stadium) and the North Korean national stadium. Both of those countries have reputations for less than stellar infrastructure.
Want to know why US education is so bad? There's a starting point...