I'm not sure. The same has been said about our medical system and that's usually blamed on "inefficiency" but from what I've seen and who I've talked to (my wife used to be in medical benefits - some of her friends still have obnoxious titles like "VP" at places like Cedars Sinai), it's not that simple. As far as medical costs, a lot of it is related to the win-at-all-costs approach the United States takes to trauma. Not all, but a lot.

As far as education, what I know of Germany's education system includes "tracking" of students a lot earlier. "High School" as I understand it is a lot more like vo-tech while "university" is a lot more like "grad school" as far as the students involved and the approaches taken.

You also have to consider that post-war Europe was essentially set up by the Marshall Plan, via fiat, to craft a society that Truman & Co wanted the world to have. Egalitarianism was seen as a great solution to demagoguery and ethnic exceptionalism, which nobody wanted to see again. "University" went from being for the privileged elite to being for everybody; Tony Judt's "Postwar" has a great set of chapters on the economic and social upheaval that caused. The United States, meanwhile, was busily being built up by the GI Bill, fighting wars in Korea and Vietnam and reaping the benefits of a proxy empire. That all started crumbling in '76 and has been crumbling ever since.

So I guess "inefficiency" is a way to look at it, but it seems like a lot more than that.