Although Ecuadorians readily acknowledge the weaknesses in their university system, they are fiercely proud of their elementary and high schools, often boasting that their students can outsmart their American counterparts any day.

"High school here in Ecuador is better than the United States - they teach you more," said Nelly Herrera, who has hosted American exchange students at her home in Ecuador.

Lest her claims be doubted, her husband Jorge Ochoa chimed in with their credentials: "I've talked to high school grads from Ecuador and the United States. I've done the comparison."

On a certain level such a claim is counterintuitive, given the wide disparity in resources available in Ecuador and the United States.

But on an anecdotal level, the belief in the superiority of Ecuadorian education finds a lot of support among students who have emigrated. When Christian Flores moved to Queens in the seventh grade, he said he felt as if he had stepped back some years in academic performance.

"Kids in high school here are dumb. They have it really easy," Flores said over breakfast at a Long Island City diner.

"They wouldn't survive high school in my country - over there it's tough," added his friend, Johann Valverde, who immigrated to New York after graduating from high school in Ecuador.

Jose Calderon, the vice president of the Hispanic Federation in New York, had a similar experience when he arrived from the Dominican Republic in the fifth grade, and he believes these stories demonstrate a wider phenomenon about Latin American life.

"The learning curve is much faster because of social realities there," Calderon said in a recent phone interview. "There's an expectation that you might not be attending college, but once you get out of high school you're very well prepared to function outside as opposed to here, where the emphasis is on higher education."

The immigrant experience in American education also speaks to the wide discrepancies in the quality of schools across the United States, even within New York City. The sub-standard education offered by public schools in many minority and immigrant neighborhoods may very well fall short of what immigrant students enjoyed in their home countries, activists say.

"Latinos here in the United States attend segregated, inherently unequal educational institutions in that they are not learning," Calderon said. "The educational system is failing them and they recognize that."

But not everyone in Ecuador agrees that the country's schools surpass those in the United States. Andres Tobar, the coordinator for the anti-corruption organization Transparency International in Ecuador, said the discrepancy comes down to a difference in teaching styles. Tobar, who studied at an American school in Quito, considers the American method to be superior.

"In Ecuador we fill young minds with a lot of useless information, so probably Ecuadorians will have more general cultural knowledge on a variety of issues, which are perfectly useless," he said. "They can quote dates and historical figures, but they are not developing the capacity to think, which is basically what I think is the major difference with the American educational system."