第 41 页

development."

The way to avoid being caught in such a storm is to identify the confluence of factors

and to change course-even though right now the sky is blue, the winds are gentle,

and the water seems calm. But that is not what has been going on in America in recent

years. We are blithely sailing along, heading straight for the storm, with both

politicians and parents insisting that no dramatic changes or sacrifices are required

now. After all, look how calm and sunny it is outside, they tell us. In the fiscal

year 2005 budget passed by the Republican-led Congress in November 2004, the budget

for the National Science Foundation, which is the federal body most responsible for

promoting research and funding more and better science education, was actually cut

by 1.9 percent, or $105 million. History will show that when America should have been

doubling the NSF funding, its Congress passed a pork-laden budget that actually cut

assistance for science and engineering.

Don't be fooled by the calm. That's always the time to change course-not when you're

just about to get hit by the typhoon. We don't have any time to waste in addressing

the "dirty little secrets" of our education system.

256

Dirty Little Secret #1: The Numbers Gap

In the Cold War, one of the deepest causes of American worries was the so-called

missile gap between us and the Soviet Union. The perfect storm Shirley Ann Jackson

is warning about could best be described as the confluence of three new gaps that

have been slowly emerging to sap America's prowess in science, math, and engineering.

They are the numbers gap, the ambition gap, and the education gap. Inthe Age of Flatism,

these gaps are what most threaten our standard of living.

Dirty little secret number one is that the generation of scientists and engineers

who were motivated to go into science by the threat of Sputnik in 1957 and the

inspiration of JFK are reaching their retirement years and are not being replaced

in the numbers that they must be if an advanced economy like that of the United States

is to remain at the head of the pack. According to the National Science Foundation,

half of America's scientists and engineers are forty years or older, and the average

age is steadily rising.

Just take one example-NASA. An analysis of NASA records conducted by the newspaper

Florida Today (March 7, 2004), which covers the Kennedy Space Center, showed the

following: Nearly 40 percent of the 18,146 people at NASA are age fifty or older.

Those with twenty years of government service are eligible for early retirement.

Twenty-two percent of NASA workers are fifty-five or older. NASA employees over sixty

outnumber those under thirty by a ratio of about three to one. Only 4 percent of NASA

workers are under thirty. A 2003 Government Accounting Office study concluded that

NASA was having difficulty hiring people with the sufficient science, engineering,

and information-technology skills that are critical to its operations. Many of these

jobs are reserved for American citizens, because of national security concerns.

Then-NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe testified before Congress in 2002: "Our mission

of understanding and protecting our home planet and exploring the universe and

searching for life will not be carried out if we don't have the people to do it."

The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the Twenty-first

Century, chaired by the former astronaut and senator John Glenn, found that two-

thirds of the nation's mathematics and science teaching force will retire by 2010.

Traditionally we made up for any shortages of engineers and science faculty by

educating more at home and importing more from abroad. But both of those remedies

have been stalled of late.

Every two years the National Science Board supervises the collection of a very broad

set of data trends in science and technology in the United States, which it publishes

as Science and Engineering Indicators. In preparing Indicators 2004, the NSB said,

"We have observed a troubling decline in the number of U.S. citizens who are training

to become scientists and engineers, whereas the number of jobs requiring science and

engineering (S&E) training continues to grow." These trends threaten the economic

welfare and security of our country, it said, adding that if the trends identified

in Indicators 2004 continue undeterred, three things will happen: "The number of jobs

in the U.S. economy that require science and engineering training will grow; the

number of U.S. citizens prepared for those jobs will, at best, be level; and the

availability of people from other countries who have science and engineering training

will decline, either because of limits to entry imposed by U.S. national security

restrictions or because of intense global competition for people with these skills."

The NSB report found that the number of American eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds

who receive science degrees has fallen to seventeenth in the world, whereas we ranked

third three decades ago. It said that of the 2.8 million first university degrees

(what we call bachelor's degrees) in science and engineering granted worldwide in

2003, 1.2 million were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, 830,000 were

granted in Europe, and 400,000 in the United States. In engineering specifically,

universities in Asian countries now produce eight times as many bachelor's degrees

as the United States.

Moreover, "the proportional emphasis on science and engineering is greater in other

nations," noted Shirley Ann Jackson. Science and engineering degrees now represent

60 percent of all bachelor's degrees earned in China, 33 percent in South Korea, and

41 percent in Taiwan. By contrast, the percentage of those taking a bachelor's degree

in science

258

and engineering in the United States remains at roughly 31 percent. Factoring out

science degrees, the number of Americans who graduate with just engineering degrees

is 5 percent, as compared to 25 percent in Russia and 46 percent in China, according

to a 2004 report by Trilogy Publications, which represents the national U.S.

engineering professional association.

The United States has always depended on the inventiveness of its people in order

to compete in the world marketplace, said the NSB. "Preparation of the S&E workforce

is a vital arena for national competitiveness. [But] even if action is taken today

to change these trends, the reversal is 10 to 20 years away." The students entering

the science and engineering workforce with advanced degrees in 2004 decided to take

the necessary math courses to enable this career path when they were in middle school,

up to fourteen years ago, the NSB noted. The students making that same decision in

middle school today won't complete advanced training for science and engineering

occupations until 2018 or 2020. "If action is not taken now to change these trends,

we could reach 2020 and find that the ability of U.S. research and education

institutions to regenerate has been damaged and that their preeminence has been lost

to other areas of the world," the science board said.

These shortages could not be happening at a worse time-just when the world is going

flat. "The number of jobs requiring science and engineering skills in the U.S. labor

force," the NSB said, "is growing almost 5 percent per year. In comparison, the rest

of the labor force is growing at just over 1 percent. Before September 11, 2001, the

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projected that science and engineering occupations

would increase at three times the rate of all occupations." Unfortunately, the NSB

reported, the average age of the science and engineering workforce is rising.

"Many of those who entered the expanding S&E workforce in the 1960s and 1970s (the

baby boom generation) are expected to retire in the next twenty years, and their

children are not choosing science and engineering careers in the same numbers as their

parents," the NSB report said. "The percentage of women, for example, choosing math

and computer science careers fell 4 percentage points between 1993 and 1999."

259

The 2002 NSB indicators showed that the number of science and engineering Ph.D.'s

awarded in the United States dropped from 29,000 in 1998 to 27,000 in 1999. The total

number of engineering undergraduates in America fell about 12 percent between the

mid-1980s and 1998.

Nevertheless, America's science and engineering labor force grew at a rate well above

that of America's production of science and engineering degrees, because a large

number of foreign-born S&E graduates migrated to the United States. The proportion

of foreign-born students in S&E fields and workers in S&E occupations continued to

rise steadily in the 1990s. The NSB said that persons born outside the United States

accounted for 14 percent of all S&E occupations in 1990. Between 1990 and 2000, the

proportion of foreign-born people with bachelor's degrees in S&E occupations rose

from 11 to 17 percent; the proportion of foreign-born with master's degrees rose from

19 to 29 percent; and the proportion of foreign-born with Ph.D.'s in the S&E labor

force rose from 24 to 38 percent. By attracting scientists and engineers born and

trained in other countries we have maintained the growth of the S&Elabor force without

a commensurate increase in support for the long-term costs of training and attracting

native U.S citizens to these fields, the NSB said.

But now, the simultaneous flattening and wiring of the world have made it much easier

for foreigners to innovate without having to emigrate. They can now do world-class

work for world-class companies at very decent wages without ever having to leave home.

As Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, put it,

"When the world was round, they could not go back home, because there was no lab to

go back to and no Internet to connect to. But now all those things are there, so they

are going back. Now they are saying, 'I feel more comfortable back home. I can live

more comfortably back home than in New York City and I can do good work, so why not

go back?'" This trend started even before the visa hassles brought on by 9/11, said

Goodman. "The brain gain started to go to brain drain around the year 2000."

As the NSB study noted, "Since the 1980s other countries have increased investment

in S&E education and the S&E workforce at higher rates than the United States has.

Between 1993 and 1997, the OECD countries [Organization for Economic Co-operation

and Development,

a group of 40 nations with highly developed market economies] increased their number

of S&E research jobs 23 percent, more than twice the 11 percent increase in S&E

research jobs in the United States."

In addition, it said, visas for students and S&E workers have been issued more slowly

since the events of September 11, owing to both increased security restrictions and

a drop in applications. The U.S. State Department issued 20 percent fewer visas for

foreign students in 2001 than in 2000, and the rate fell farther in subsequent years.

While university presidents told me in 2004 that the situation was getting better,

and that the Department of Homeland Security was trying to both speed up and simplify

its visa procedures for foreign students and scientists, a lot of damage has been

done, and the situation for foreign students or scientists wanting to work in any

areas deemed to have national security implications is becoming a real problem. No

wonder New York Times education writer Sam Dillon reported on December 21, 2004, that

"foreign applications to American graduate schools declined 28 percent this year.

Actual foreign graduate student enrollments dropped 6 percent. Enrollments of all

foreign students, in undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral programs, fell for the

first time in three decades in an annual census released this fall. Meanwhile,

university enrollments have been surging in England, Germany and other countries. . .

Chinese applications to American graduate schools fell 45 percent this year, while

several European countries announced surges in Chinese enrollment."

Dirty Little Secret #2: The Ambition Gap

The second dirty little secret, which several prominent American CEOs told me only

in a whisper, goes like this: When they send jobs abroad, they not only save 75 percent

on wages, they get a 100 percent increase in productivity. Part of that is

understandable. When you take a low-wage, low-prestige job in America, like a call

center operator, and bring it over to India, where it becomes a high-wage,

high-prestige job,

261

you end up with workers who are paid less but motivated more. "The dirty little secret

is that not only is [outsourcing] cheaper and efficient," the American CEO of a

London-headquartered multinational told me, "but the quality and productivity [boost]

is huge." In addition to the wage compression, he said, one Bangalore Indian retrained

will do the work of two or three Europeans, and the Bangalore employees don't take

six weeks of holidays. "When you think it's only about wages," he added, "you can

still hold your dignity, but the fact that they work better is awful."

A short time after returning from India, I was approached in an airport by a young

man who wanted to talk about some columns I had written from there. We had a nice

chat, I asked him for his card, and we struck up an e-mail friendship. His name is

Mike Arguello, and he is an IT systems architect living in San Antonio. He does

high-end IT systems design and does not feel threatened by foreign competition. He

also teaches computer science. When I asked him what we needed to do in America to