America's industrial leadership

The foundation for leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is not poured in graduate school.  Or even in high school.  It is set in the upper levels of gradeschool and junior high.  But the lack of a foundation is showing up, according to National Science Foundation data, as fewer U.S. students getting college degrees in the sciences or engineering.  The U.S. is well behind much of the industralized world in this area:

Consider this situation at the college level (National Science Foundation data):

        Among persons 24 years old who hold a B.S. or B.A. degree (in 2001)

Country            Percent Bachelor's degrees in engineering
U.S.                                    5%
China                               39%
South Korea                     27%
Taiwan                            23%
Japan                              19%

In the past, it has been the technical human talent that has driven the U.S.'s success in industry, manufacturing and the creation of intellectual property (IP).   Over 50% of the CEO's of Fortune 100 companies have a technical education background.  And there is a high correlation between technical innovations that drive new industrial markets and the presence of PhD-level capabilities in the physical sciences and engineering.

But U.S.-based capabilities at the graduate level in the physical sciences are shrinking while they are on the rise in much of the rest of the industrialized world.

Why aren't U.S. students taking science as a major in college?  Because, for many if not most of them, they can't.  They gave up that option in grade school and high school.  They don't have the basic skills that allow them to even attempt most science classes, let alone succeed in them.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) from the year 2000 shows that 2% of U.S. 12th graders are rated at the "advanced" capability level in science.  Worse, only 16 percent are rated even "proficient."  About half of 12th graders in the U.S. are rated as "below partial proficiency" in the sciences.

Unfortunately, this is not a global trend.  The International Math and Science Study shows how U.S. students' skills compare to those of students in other countries.  As an example, U.S. 12th graders were in the 10th percentile, globally, in terms of their science skills -- 90% of the world's 12th-grade students were stronger in the sciences than U.S. 12th graders.

U.S. students, as a group, do well in international comparisons at the 4th-grade level, mediocre in the 8th grade and poor in the 12th grade.

Robert Herbold is a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and he is head of a subcommittee called Workforce/Education.  This subcommittee is studying why U.S. students are so weak in science and engineering.  One reason, according to this committee, is that K-12 science teachers are not themselves competent in science -- over 50% of the people teaching science didn't major or minor in science in the college of education, let alone the real college science majors.  Worse, the teachers who DO have training in science apparently don't actually teach science very much because, in 2003, 93% of K-12 students who took science were taught by teachers who had not themselves taken much science.  It's hard for these teachers to even teach the topics, let alone get students to be excited about it.  Fewer than 1/3 of 9th graders who take a "science track" at school are still in that track at graduation from high school.

If the teaching is weak, it is no surprise that the curricula are weak, too.  In 2003, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) rated less than 10% of middle school and high school math books in the U.S. to be "acceptable" and no science books.  It is recommended that high schools require three years of math and two years of science -- less than half require that much math and less than a fourth of high schools require that much science.

In addition to weak teaching skills in the sciences and weak curricula, there is the problem of how education budgets are spent:  the Dept of Education says that only 53% of education funding actually gets spent on activities related to instruction.

Our son and daughter think they are doing pretty well in school and we keep telling them that may be because they aren't seeing the real competition.  Maybe the real competition isn't in their class or in their school or even in their country. 

But Microsoft and Nokia and IBM and other large technology-based firms know where the talent is.  Microsoft, for example, just opened a recruiting office across from IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology, in India, and they hire as many of IIT's graduates as are interested in working for Microsoft.  They don't have similar recruiting plans at many U.S. colleges.  Our son and daughter don't see the students in India and Viet Nam and China working evenings and weekends on technical homework and they assume that everyone in the world is working about the same as they are.  One consequence of this complacency in science in the lower grades is that when U.S. students get to college, the vast majority of them  decide that they won't go into a technical field.  And this reduces one of the major contributors to technical innovation and the development of intellectual property in the U.S. and contributes to moving that activity elsewhere.

Links for the information that is listed above and for more discussion:
Main link
National Science Foundation and NAEP
National Science Foundation links