Thanks in part to desegregation, both Jackson’s inspiration and intellect were recognized early, and she ultimately became the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from MIT (her degree was in theoretical elementary particle physics). From there, she spent many years working for AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1995 was appointed by President Clinton to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As the years went by, though, Jackson began to notice that fewer and fewer young Americans were captivated by national challenges like the race to the moon, or felt the allure of math, science, and engineering. In universities, she noted, graduate enrollment in science and engineering programs, having grown for decades, peaked in 1993, and despite some recent progress, it remains today below the level of a decade ago. So the science and engineering generations that followed Jackson’s got smaller and smaller relative to our needs. By the time Jackson took the job as Rensselaer Polytechnic’s president to put her heart and soul into reinvigorating American science and engineering, she realized, she said, that a “perfect storm” was brewing—one that posed a real long-term danger to America’s economic health—and she started speaking out about it whenever she could.
p. 255 “The phrase ‘the perfect storm’ is associated with meteorological events in October 1991,” said Jackson in a speech in May 2004, when “a powerful weather system gathered force, ravaging the Atlantic Ocean over the course of several days, [and] caused the deaths of several Massachusetts-based fishermen and billions of dollars of damage. The event became a book, and, later, a movie. Meteorologists observing the event emphasized . . . the unlikely confluence of conditions . . . in which multiple factors converged to bring about an event of devastating magnitude. [A] similar worst-case scenario could arrest the progress of our national scientific and technological capacity. The forces at work are multiple and complex. They are demographic, political, economic, cultural, even social.” Individually, each of these forces would be problematic, added Jackson. In combination, they could be devastating. “For the first time in more than a century, the United States could well find itself falling behind other countries in the capacity for scientific discovery, innovation and economic 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.
Dirty Little Secret #1: The Numbers Gap
p. 256 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. In the 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-p. 257thirds 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 p. 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 t
o 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.” p. 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&E labor 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, p. 260 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, p. 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 get our edge back, he sent me this e-mail:
I taught at a local university. It was disheartening to see the poor work ethic of many of my students. Of the students I taught over six semesters, I’d only consider hiring two of them. The rest lacked the creativity, problem-solving abilities and passion for learning. As you well know, India’s biggest advantage over the Chinese and Russians is that they speak English. But it would be wrong to assume the top Indian developers are better than their American counterparts. The advantage they have is the number of bodies they can throw at a problem. The Indians that I work with are the cream of the crop. They are educated by the equivalents of MIT back in India and there are plenty of them. If you were to follow me in my daily meetings it would become very obvious that a great deal of my time is spent working with Indians. Most managers are probably still under the impression that all Indians are doing is lower-end software development—“software assembly.” But technologies, such as Linux, are allowing them to start taking higher-paying system design jobs that had previously p. 262 been the exclusive domain of American workers. It has provided them with the means to move up the t
echnology food chain, putting them on par with domestic workers. It’s brain power against brain power, and in this area they are formidable. From a technology perspective, the world is flat and getting flatter (if that is possible). The only two areas that I have not seen Indian labor in are networking architects and system architects, but it is only a matter of time. Indians are very bright and they are quickly learning from their interaction with system architects just how all of the pieces of the IT puzzle fit together . . . Were Congress to pass legislation to stop the flow of Indian labor, you would have major software systems that would have nobody who knew what was going on. It is unfortunate that many management positions in IT are filled with non-technical managers who may not be fully aware of their exposure . . . I’m an expert in information systems, not economics, but I know a high-paying job requires one be able to produce something of high value. The economy is producing the jobs both at the high end and low end, but increasingly the high-end jobs are out of reach of many. Low education means low-paying jobs, plain and simple, and this is where more and more Americans are finding themselves. Many Americans can’t believe they aren’t qualified for high-paying jobs. I call this the “American Idol problem.” If you’ve ever seen the reaction of contestants when Simon Cowell tells them they have no talent, they look at him in total disbelief. I’m just hoping someday I’m not given such a rude awakening.
The World Is Flat Page 30
