The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  THE PRESENT

  Although exact numbers are difficult to come by, it’s estimated China has at least 12 million students enrolled in core science curricula at institutions of higher learning. That does not include the Chinese students enrolled in America’s best centers of high-tech education, students who will take those skills back home to help their native country move ahead of the nation that educated them.

  During the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, I reported on China’s leading computer science institute. It was run by a Taiwanese national, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, who had been educated in the United States and had become one of America’s leading authorities in computer education. He taught at MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton before the Chinese government recruited him to run Tsinghua University, a prestigious technology academy training the country’s best young minds in computer science.

  Students who qualify arrive from throughout the country, for even in the rural areas the fundamentals of a broad range of sciences are required courses. Yao was thrilled with the quality of students he was attracting from all over China. His only concern was whether they would eventually succumb to the siren song of investment banking and venture capital instead of staying in the pure sciences. (We met just before the great American financial meltdown reached catastrophic proportions, a development that might have prompted some second thoughts about investment banking as a future.)

  The result of China’s commitment to science—both by the government and the wider population—is the reason that bright, young Chinese economists visiting U.S. companies, think tanks, and academies give off a strong but unspoken impression. In tone and attitude they appear to be thinking, “We’re coming and you’re leaving.”

  In an Atlantic magazine essay on the future of America, journalist James Fallows welcomed that attitude, in context. “America will be better off if China flourishes than if it flounders,” he argued. “A prospering China will mean a bigger world economy with more opportunities and probably less turmoil.”

  For now, however, China and India still have a long way to go to catch up. In universal aptitude tests, scholars at India’s best institutions of science and math score in the lower half of the global universe of science students. Fallows notes that China’s top science and technological institutions are not among the one hundred best in the world.

  Other studies have turned up a quality gap between U.S.-trained engineers, for example, and those trained in India and China. In 2005, the McKinsey Global Institute determined that more than 80 percent of engineers educated in America were employable in the global economy. Only 10 percent of the Chinese trained in their country were ready for the demands of the global workplace. Indian engineers were more prepared, but they had serious shortcomings, such as the inability to think for themselves. They were oriented to follow orders, not innovate, according to several surveys.

  Chinese science education has similar weaknesses. Creative thinking, entrepreneurship, and interpersonal and intercultural skills are not emphasized. In a book called China’s Emerging Technological Edge: Assessing the Role of High-End Talent, authors Denis Fred Simon and Cong Cao concluded, “Chinese universities have become technique focused.… Rote learning, in which students who can answer questions in classrooms may not be able to solve and manage real life problems, still dominates higher education” there.

  One prominent American businessman who has spent decades in China admires the country’s enterprise and the turn it has taken in the past twenty-five years, but, he told me, “They still don’t know what they don’t know.”

  We cannot count on that disparity at the highest educational levels lasting forever. China and India are just beginning their national crusades for excellence and they both have a vast population of students eager to take advantage. They’re beginning to recognize and address the issues of imaginative management and critical thinking at the computer console or on the high-tech assembly line.

  Richard C. Levin, the president of Yale University, is convinced that China and India can catch up by the middle of the century. Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, he cited China’s commitment to establish its own Ivy League, what the Chinese call the C-9, and India’s determination to build fourteen world-class universities.

  Levin says the Chinese are ahead of India in getting beyond rote learning to critical thinking by developing more liberal educational institutions, but he raises the essential question: Can you have a world-class comprehensive university while constraining freedom of expression in political, social, and humanities studies?

  In the end, Levin believes the rapid evolution of Chinese and Indian higher education is a force for good, concluding, “The fate of the planet depends on humanity’s ability to collaborate across borders to solve society’s most pressing problems—the persistence of poverty, the prevalence of disease, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the shortage of fresh water and the danger of global warming. Having better-educated citizens and leaders can only help.”

  Yale is among the many educational institutions actively recruiting students from Asia and establishing new relationships. Levin connected with the University of Singapore to create a Yale liberal arts center in that tiny but powerful island state. It will be Singpaore’s first liberal arts college, offering what the two schools promise will be “education from the Western and Asian perspective.”

  It’s not just the elites looking east. The Reformed Church in America, with its roots in Holland, has small colleges in Iowa and Michigan hoping to find new students through their network of Reformed Church missionaries in the Pacific states and Asian mainland.

  The world is getting smaller, campus by campus.

  In the meantime, the challenge for America is to make it easier for motivated students from wherever to come to the United States, the immigrant nation, for their education, and then to stay.

  Not long ago, only about 10 percent of the Chinese who attained a doctorate in America returned home. Now, with the new opportunities in China, that percentage is moving up steadily and American immigration policies are contributing to the loss of the best and brightest from foreign lands.

  Foreign nationals who want to stay typically end up with an H-1B visa, which limits their time in America to seven years before it can be renewed through a tedious process involving their employers or financial backers and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

  A few years ago a speaker at an Aspen Institute conference in Colorado came up with what all participants agreed was the single best idea to emerge from all the rhetorical ping-pong. He suggested having an immigration official stationed at every American graduation ceremony for science students. As the foreign graduates walked off the stage, the INS official would step up and staple green cards to their diplomas.

  Susan Hockfield, the neuroscientist who became the first female president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put the immigrant scientist equation in perspective in an op-ed column for The Wall Street Journal. “From MIT alone,” she wrote, “foreign graduates have founded an estimated 2,340 active U.S. companies that employ over 100,000 people.”

  That’s obviously a welcome dividend for America, but as Hockfield pointed out, “Amazingly, if as incoming students they had told U.S. immigration officials that they hoped to stay on as entrepreneurs after graduation, they would have been turned back at the border.”

  President Hockfield isn’t the only opinion leader to recognize the disconnect between immigration policy and national needs. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, an articulate and imaginative champion of urgently upgrading America’s science education standards, described attending a black-tie Washington dinner to honor finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search. The vast majority of the finalists, all American high school students, were from families that had immigrated here from India and China.

  As Friedman wrote, these immigrant families are “the key to keeping us ahead of China. Because when you mix all these energetic
, high-aspiring people with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens.”

  Friedman called the dinner the most inspiring experience he’d had in twenty years in Washington, and he wound up his column quoting the student spokesman for the group, Alice Wei Zhao of North High School in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She told the audience, “Don’t sweat the problems our generation will have to deal with. Believe me, our future is in good hands.”

  That is, if the grown-ups give the youngsters the tools and support they need.

  True, students in mostly white suburban American schools hold their own against students in global math and science competitions, but we’re not the United States of White Suburbs.

  Fundamental math skills will be required at all levels of our society, as the requirements for workers evolve along ever more technological lines. It is no longer enough to have just a strong back, good hands, and a pair of sturdy boots to be a valued worker.

  If, for example, Benjamin from The Graduate followed Mr. McGuire’s hypothetical twenty-first-century advice and pursued a career in which math and science skills were important, he might apply for a job at Google, the company that has spread its applications all over this new universe.

  Benjamin would not be alone. It’s estimated Google gets three thousand job applications a day through its website. Promising applicants are invited for an interview that, according to the company, “evaluates your core software engineering skills, including: coding, algorithm development, data structures, design patterns, analytical thinking skills. Interviewers will ask questions related to your area of interest and ask you to solve problems in real time. Creativity is important.”

  Google developer advocate Don Dodge, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry who had worked at Microsoft, says he nonetheless was asked for his SAT scores and college grade point average when he applied for a position at Google. He was also asked to solve problems such as “There are eight balls. Seven of them weigh the same but one is heavier. Using a balance scale how do you find the heaviest ball in just two weighings?”

  Other Google brain tests were more practical. “Say an advertiser makes ten cents every time someone clicks on their ad. Only twenty percent of the people who visit the site click on the ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make twenty dollars?”

  “If you had a million integers how would you sort them and how much memory would that consume?”

  “What is the best and worst performance time for a hash tree and a binary search tree?”

  “Write some code to find all permutations of the letters in a particular string.”

  Google attracted a lot of engineering applicants by posting a problem on a San Francisco–area billboard and inviting those solving it to apply for a job. The URL for the application process was hidden in the answer.

  THE PROMISE

  As one who has to refer to a calendar to remember his grandchildren’s birthdates, I don’t think I’d make it in a Google job interview. But I hope some of my grandkids might, once they get past their twenty-second birthday, whenever that is.

  America’s shameful record in creating a foundation of science-literate citizens is not a secret in the public or private sector.

  Some of America’s most successful entrepreneurs—Bill and Melinda Gates, hedge fund billionaire and former math professor Jim Simons, and billionaire California home builder Eli Broad—are devoting big chunks of their fortunes and personal energies to improving American education through innovative teaching programs and supplemental funding for school districts. But the popular culture works against them, despite the conspicuous success of former math and science whiz kids such as Gates, Jobs, Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, and Gordon Moore and Andy Grove of Intel. (Full disclosure: When I encountered advanced algebra and trigonometry, I knew my future would be more rewarding with words and political events than with x, y, and cosines.)

  A few years ago in St. Louis I appeared before a group of journalism students at Washington University, a prestigious school with an enviable reputation in the sciences. The meeting took place in a chemistry lecture hall with a large display of the periodic table looming over the speaker’s podium.

  I began by staring at it for a moment and then gesturing as I said to the students, “That, ladies and gentlemen, is why I am journalist.”

  While the periodic table and I went our separate ways, one of my many informal rules of life is that those inclined to science are stimulating company with a wide range of interests. I never have a better time on a campus than when I visit Caltech or MIT, Stanford or Johns Hopkins, because the students in the sciences combine the intellectual discipline of their fields with the curiosity of explorers in all they do, including their personal commitment to social causes.

  James Trefil, a physics professor at George Mason University, has written that if we expect citizens to deal with the complex problems of global warming, stem cells, genetic engineering, food additives, and the like, “The very least we can do is teach them the basic principles that underlie the problem.” Science is as critical to the making of a modern citizen as plowing with a team of horses was to the making of a successful nineteenth-century homesteader.

  Education at an elite institution will not be the only ticket to employment in the new world order. In the evolving global economy there are going to be very good jobs for Americans willing to go abroad, not just for foreigners willing to come here. A graduate of, say, Colorado State University’s College of Engineering who spends four years working in China’s energy industry, picking up the language and getting to know the culture, adds real muscle to his or her résumé when it’s time to come home.

  I like to remind upscale parents that while they fret over admission strategies for the Ivy League schools or any number of the elite institutions, the first choice for students in some parts of America, including in much of rural America, is enlisting in the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Army. The U.S. military is tough duty, but it’s also a gateway to learning real skills or qualifying for college financial aid.

  During a reporting trip on the USS John C. Stennis, one of America’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, I was taken deep into that floating colossus to meet the young technicians who work 24/7 to maintain its high-tech components. The skills they learn there are readily transferable to a civil society in constant need of a workforce trained to keep our electronic homes, factories, offices, and public institutions humming.

  Throughout the ship I saw earnest young sailors bent over their laptops, taking college courses or vocational training online. That was before passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, under which young men and women are now eligible for financial support for tuition, fees, books, and housing after ninety days of aggregate service or thirty days if discharged with a service-connected disability.

  Democratic senator Jim Webb of Virginia, a highly decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam and a graduate of Georgetown University’s law school, led the drive to expand the educational benefits for those currently in uniform, recognizing that the vast majority of men and women in the all-volunteer military are the underrepresented working-class young.

  This is an investment that goes well beyond the young person who heretofore had little hope of getting a college degree or specialized vocational training. The presence of veterans on campuses or at select training schools is a major step toward addressing the disconnect between the 1 percent of Americans in uniform and in harm’s way and the 99 percent of us who can go about our pleasurable civilian lives without even acknowledging wars are under way.

  Washington University studied the gap between the uniformed military population and civilian society and concluded it represents a serious threat to the American polity because it could lead to a more politicized military, presumably because those in uniform believe they’re either being ignored or are underappreciated by the civilian population. Furthermore, if those in uniform feel they’re being ignored or undervalued, why bother joining
in the first place?

  On the campuses where they’re enrolled in GI Bill programs, veterans do much more than remind their fellow students by their presence that the military is not incidental to American life. California State University chancellor Charles Reed says the veterans are “the exact profile of the kinds of students we want—smart, serious but balanced, committed, contributing and diverse.”

  Corporate America knows the value of military training and the disciplined, technologically based education that comes with it. General Electric is an enthusiastic recruiter of military officers in their late thirties or early forties who are captains, majors, or colonels. They’ve given their country fifteen or twenty years of their lives, and many have graduate degrees to go with their on-the-job training as personnel managers, problem solvers, and motivators. They arrive in the private sector with a can-do attitude and the chance for a second career that will take them into their fifties and sixties. In the modern parlance, that’s called a win-win.

  In a book called Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer studied the impact of mandatory military service for young Israelis on Israel’s booming entrepreneurial economy and concluded that early training in the Israel Defense Forces was the critical component. Israelis go into the IDF right out of high school and quickly learn the values of teamwork, discipline, and, most of all, wise risk management.

  Following their military service they enroll in college and continue their preparation for the daunting world of start-up businesses. They’re mature beyond their years and Israel gets a twofer: a strong, all-inclusive commitment to national security and a post-military population equipped to take the economy to the next level.

  The economic downturn did force one important change in post–high school education: Community colleges suddenly became popular destinations for the young who want a job but are not inclined to four-year higher education institutions.