A Simple Way To Help Keep America Competitive
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.
July 17th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Global business is practically independent of national boundaries. But consider taking a page from GE’s playbook, open up immigration to the best talent from abroad. The fact is, the US has the greatest equity in terms of freedom and wealth. Why not capitalize on it ?
This is a classic management play – recruiting the best possible talent, even if that talent is poached from the competitors… but the question remains, what to do about the bottom 10%….
August 7th, 2007 at 5:48 am
So China produces about 3x the engineers as the US does. Doesn’t China have about 3x the population? A somewhat more relevant number might be the percentage of university grads that are science/engineering majors; without actually knowing this, I assume its higher in China and India. This might be a greater cause for concern, but with all those engineers, who is majoring in business management? That is where America’s competitive advantages lie; putting talent to work for us.
August 28th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Actually, there is very little evidence that more scientists are needed. In fact, all evidence points to the contrary. Consider the $35,000 salary of a typical biomedical postdoc fellow, and the grim career prospects of a recently minted Ph.D. If the demand for scientists truly outstripped demand, then salaries would be higher for qualified biomedical Ph.D.s. My answer to the companies that are demanding more scientists is simple: reward us financially for our expertise and hard work, and more people will follow in our footsteps.