Academia? USA.

I hate these kinds of threads as a general rule, but I'm really happy to see this one included in the list--especially because it was distinguished from "science." Setting aside the matter of student costs, which I admit is hugely important, the U.S. is the premier destination for students, scholars, and researchers at the post-secondary level. The U.K. is a contender for the per capita title, but the sheer number of top-tier research universities in the US is staggering.

So many major metro areas in the US have not one but two internationally recognized top-tier universities. Boston has MIT and Harvard; New York has Columbia and NYU; Chicago has UofC and Northwestern; the triangle has Duke and UNC; the bay area has Stanford and Berkeley; Los Angeles has Cal Tech and UCLA. And then you've got the major state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Texas, Georgia Tech, UCSB, UCI, UCD, etc.) and the top-flight privates like Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Rice, Vanderbilt, etc. And those are just research universities, and a very small portion of them.

Of course other countries have fantastic universities; but by basically any metric other than student costs, and perhaps faculty salary, the US dominates. The enormous investment Americans have made in academia is something we should be proud of.