The New York Times has an article today entitled “Top Advisory Panel Warns of an Erosion of the U.S. Competitive Edge in Science” discussing a report issued by the National Academies concerning the scientific competitiveness of the United States. Here is an interesting fact
Last year, more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China, compared to 350,000 in India and 70,000 in the United States.
Funny, when I read this, the first thought which comes to my mind is that the competitiveness for engineering jobs in China must be huge!
I always have a big mixed bag of emotions when I read articles like this. On the one hand, like most scientist, I tend to think that science and research are underfunded. Funding as a percent of GDP is about half what it was in the 60s. On the other hand, I tend to see the increase in funding by other countries in a postive light: that other governments are realizing they need to spend more on science and research is good for the researchers in those country and also good for the world (of course global inequities mean this good is diluted as a function of distance down the first to second to third world ladder.)
What has certainly been true over the last fifty years is that the U.S. has built up an incredible system of higher education (seventy percent of Nobel prize winners work in U.S. universities, as one silly example. We spend about twice as much as western Europe on higher education per student, as another example.) But do I begrudge the rest of the world similar top universities? That doesn’t seem right. On the other hand, when I see destructive factors at work in the U.S. university system (as for example is occuring because of perceived (and actual 🙁 ) hostility towards foreign graduate students) this doesn’t make me happy.
So sometimes it’s hard to keep up a gloomy face: behind all of the rhetoric, I see the world progressing at an increasing rate, which, I believe is a good thing. I guess I just won’t be good for producing a report like this one, because I’d focus almost exclusively on the negatives of the U.S. system and little on the postives of the other nations progress (except as an example.)
Which still doesn’t change the fact that science and math education in the US appears to be (on average) absymal. When grocery store employees have to run to their calculators to figure out the change due for a dollar bill on a 50-cent stick of gum, and undergraduates taking physical chemistry call tell me that “the only way to do derivatives is Mathematica”, well,…
Yes, indeed, it is abysmal. But I think it is important to clarify what the “it” is!
I think there is an important distinction to be made between those who will use their math and science skills to do cutting edge research and build the next generation of new technologies and the education of the mass of people who will never be carrying out this task. Yeah, this is elitist as all hell, but what can I say, I’m an elitist pig. But importantly, the reason I make this distinction is that I feel they lead to two different problems. On the latter, the US has been (and still is) THE leader (how long this will last, however, is less clear.) However, for the former problem, the US has been at the bottom of western countries for a long time. The state of science and math education prior to college, where a student may actually get challenged, seems to be in horrible shape.