Sorry if this question is stupid or has been asked, but I've been wondering what specifically happened in the United States (or the world in a larger scope) to cause the United States to fall behind towards the latter end of the 20th century, and other countries to catch up or surpass the United States? I've had a pretty hard time finding specific rankings of education by country, but in a documentary I watched it said the United States had the best public school education in anywhere in the world in the first half of the 20th century; and by the end of the 20th century it seemed like it was in crisis; as it was underfunded, overcrowded, and many kids were not passing the state requirements of school.
Is the answer as simple as other countries simply improved, or is there something to pinpoint the decline in the United States in terms of GDP per capita and education? The United States still has a relatively high GDP per capita that's been steady, but the growth compared to other countries has been pretty slow during this time period and many European countries have surpassed the United States in terms of educational requirements. For example, the United States was higher than Switzerland and Norway from the 1960s, but then it seemed Switzerland and Norway had both gotten ahead, and by 1995 both were higher than the United States in terms of GDP per capita.
I can speak to the GDP per capita issue.
Switzerland and Norway are (and were) small European countries relative to the USA. Small countries' economies are much more affected by fairly localised issues, like geographical chance. For example, Norway has oil fields, Texas and Alaskans have oil fields, both things are fairly independent of any virtue or vice of Norwegians or Americans. But the contribution of Texan/Alaskan oil sales (and that of other American oil producing areas, such as US territorial waters in the Mexican Gulf) are spread over a lot more people in the US GDP per capita than that of Norwegian oil. North Sea oil production really got started in the 1970s, after the OPEC oil shocks, so Norwegian GDP per capita surged from then.
Norway and Switzerland are both mountainous countries with lots of potential for hydro capacity. Hydro power stations are expensive to build but very cheap to run, so make large contributions to GDP (either by being able to sell the electricity at a high mark up, perhaps across the border, or by selling electricity cheaply thus encouraging electricity-intensive industries like aluminium smelters to set up locally). The US has lots of mountainous areas, and a higher installed hydro base than Norway or Switzerland, but it also has a lot of flatter areas. So again, the US average is lower. Turning to history, European integration of the electricity networks, at least of central Western Europe, started pre-WWII but took off post WWII, rising from 1% of total production in 1955 to over 4% in 1965 (4% may still sound small, but the impact of transmission capacity is the highest when things are tight). The Scandinavian electricity integration unit, Nordel, was set up in 1963, again post WWII. And the major western European economies of France, Italy and West Germany were enjoying rapid growth in the 1950s and '60s, which meant more demand for Swiss power exports, and, a bit more indirectly, Norwegian exports.
What's more, GDP measures what is produced within a country, regardless of whether it is produced by residents or non-residents. Switzerland has long had a significant banking sector which handles considerable money owned by people in other countries, and while the ownership of assets isn't part of GDP they do tend to come with higher contribution of financial services. The USA of course has Wall Street but, like Texan & Alaskan oil, when we calculate US GDP per capita Wall Street is spread across a lot of people. And Wall Street was further, geographically and culturally, from the post-WWII economic growth of the big Western Europe countries.
With Switzerland, albeit mainly in the last 20 years there's also been growing cross-border commuting: people who live outside Switzerland but commute in regularly to work there, therefore contributing to the GDP numerator but not the "per capita" denominator, as that's based on residents.
It's not all about geographical and historical chance of course. Norway and Switzerland are stable, high-trust democracies which is generally associated with prosperity. And there's always the chance of bad decision-making in a country's governance. But in general, the smaller a country, the bigger the role for luck.
tl;dr When it comes to GDP per capita, it's probably more informative to compare Norway and Switzerland to individual US states, not the US as a whole, due to the law of large numbers.