No, Carl’s claim was not false since neither he nor the OP were talking about per capita numbers. It was the original tweet that first complained about China graduating more STEM students in absolute numbers, not relative to population sizes, and Carl replied with a correction in the same metric. At most you could say that it’s misleading to cite absolute numbers without also mentioning differences in population size, but again, that’s on the OP.

I guess the original poster thinks that even though the US has a smaller population, they should be graduating more STEM students than China, probably because they’re a silly racist who thinks that non-Western countries wouldn’t or shouldn’t even be able to achieve the same, let alone better, performance per capita as the US if it weren’t for “the Left” and their “diversity” messing things up.