We need more geeks. Personally, we love geeks. But the truth is that geeks are critical to our country’s economic and technical excellence.

Last year, the National Academies of Science and Engineering published a report called “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” The premise of the report is that the United States is being challenged in science and technology by global competitors such as China, India, Israel and the European Union. China’s universities graduate more than 600,000 people every year in engineering, computer science, and information technology; U.S. universities graduates 222,000 people every year in the same majors. Our ability to build and fuel great innovative companies is based in the quality of our workforce. Ask any high tech CEO and he or she will tell you they are challenged to fill their technical and engineering positions. It’s not just a question of cost, but of the quality and quantity of potential domestic candidates.

The issue is complex and involves our attitudes toward the rest of the world, during a time when the rest of the world isn’t so happy with us. We need to work to solve that and make it easier for those smart graduates from other countries come here to invent new stuff. But the United States also needs to put science back into our own classrooms.

I propose a simple solution: add science to the SAT Reasoning Test test along with reading, writing, and math. By making science a required subject for testing prior to admission to college, we would ensure that all of America’s college students would be grounded with a solid science foundation and would encourage a greater number of college students to major in science and technology fields.

An entrepreneur I respect: “I had a VC in my office today pitching us on taking their money and he said something interesting; he talked about our profitability as a species of strangulation, in that we have willingly choked off a lot of potential growth expenses to continue to bootstrap. He’s right. But there’s nothing like the discipline of fueling hires thru cashflow to keep you honest…”

He’s right? Must have been some MBA-programmed associate who tried that line out on my guy. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to call myself a venture capitalist, when I hear other VCs talk like that. Building businesses isn’t a zero-sum game, where there’s only just so much business and if you don’t get all of it, right now and without regard to operating or gross margins, you will never get it.

I recommend reading Joe Nocera’s column about Beliefnet in today’s New York Times (subscription might be required, but I can’t figure out the current policy on URLs), for a more rational view on how business gets done. The lead sentence: “I found the Chapter 11 period exhilarating.”