Growing businesses and economies depend critically on a pool of educated people, leading edge ideas and technologies, robust investment, and growing market opportunities. Whether advanced manufacturing, information technology, energy, medicine and healthcare, or a host of domains, in an increasingly competitive global economy, continued innovation, fueled by a judicious combination of private and public sector actions, is key to success. Implicit in this model is an educational system that attracts and trains the talented individuals needed by businesses and a research and development environment that continually catalyzes new products and services.
Every two years, the National Science Board (NSB) assesses the state of the U.S. research and development enterprise, issuing a Congressionally mandated report on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and U.S. investment in research and development. How is the U.S. faring in education and innovation relative to the rest of the world? Simply put, not nearly as well as in the past.
The NSB is a group of twenty-four scientific experts, appointed by the U.S. President for six-year terms. The NSB has two statutory responsibilities. First, it provides strategic, policy, and budgetary oversight for the National Science Foundation. In its second role, most relevant here, it provides advice to the White House and Congress on science and technology issues, STEM education, and workforce concerns. I am honored to serve as a member of the NSB.
This year’s NSB report, The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022, shows that other countries have learned from the historical successes of the U.S., and they are dramatically increasing their investment in STEM education and research and development. Even as U.S. intellectual output has grown, China has surpassed the U.S. on several key metrics, including the number of science and engineering research publications and the number of issued patents, and it is at near parity on the number of science and engineering doctoral degrees awarded. Overall, the U.S. still leads, but not by nearly as large a margin as in the past.
Let’s begin by examining STEM workers in the U.S., which now comprise 23% of the total U.S. workforce. These STEM workers include a wide spectrum of occupations, ranging from scientists, engineers, and healthcare workers through technicians and workers in production and construction. About 16 million of these STEM workers hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, with the remaining 20 million comprising the skilled technical workforce (i.e., with associate degrees, certificates, and other technical training). Reflecting their criticality to the U.S. economy, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, these high paying STEM jobs were resilient, with STEM workers employed at a higher rate than their non-STEM counterparts – at all education levels.
Sadly, U.S. STEM education leaves many students behind in our K-12 schools. U.S. 15-year-olds rank between Hungary and Turkey in national mathematics proficiency, behind the large majority of industrialized economies. However, the challenges begin even earlier. On average, U.S. 8th grade students of all ethnicities who are eligible for free or reduced school lunches fail to achieve mathematics proficiency, but the disparity is most pronounced for Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native students. If a student is fortunate to be in a higher socioeconomic status (SES), the mathematics news is not much better.
Moreover, K-12 STEM teachers with fewer than 3 years of experience are more prevalent at schools with high-minority or high-poverty populations, perpetuating generational inequities. Nor does this inequitable state of affairs improve in college and post-graduate studies, where women and individuals of color are substantially underrepresented in STEM fields.
Why is it culturally acceptable in the U.S. to say, “I’m bad at math and science” when few would willingly confess to semi-literacy by saying “I don’t read very well.” Unless we reward and remunerate STEM teachers, celebrate student STEM accomplishments, and value scientific and mathematics literacy, the U.S. is likely to continue falling further behind its global competitors.
In a previous life, I was a Microsoft corporate officer, and met I often with government leaders from around the world. In my travels, I consistently emphasized the importance of a country’s people as its only truly renewable resource. I also reminded leaders that talent comes from everywhere – from all ethnic groups and socioeconomic strata. Wise leaders nurture and cultivate talent everywhere, without exception. The U.S. needs to heed that lesson.
If the U.S. STEM workforce were truly representative of the U.S. population, millions of additional skilled workers would be inventing the future and supercharging the U.S. economy. These “missing millions” are a huge lost opportunity for the U.S., all at a time when an increasing fraction of jobs require critical thinking, technical knowledge, and mathematical reasoning.
To meet a portion of this shortfall, the U.S., has historically imported talent, particularly at advanced levels. In my own discipline, computer science, over 60 percent of Ph.D.’s. working in the U.S. are foreign born. Many of them came here because U.S. research universities remain the envy of the world, attracting some of the world’s best and brightest.
However, the numbers of immigrant graduate students have declined recently due to COVID-19, shifting U.S. immigration policies, and rising opportunities in their home countries. U.S. academic preeminence is also increasingly at risk, as state support for public higher education declines, tuition rises, and competition for limited research funding intensifies, making it harder for domestic students to attend college, continue graduate studies, and pursue faculty careers.
Continued U.S. scientific and engineering leadership, with its manifest economic benefits, is not a birthright. Every business person instinctively knows the truth of the aphorism from Intel’s Andrew Grove:
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Leadership is built on sustained and strategic investment in education and critical workforce skills, as well as a collaborative industry and government research and development investment engine that fuels new businesses. The U.S. is now at a critical inflection point. It is time to up our game by investing in our people and infrastructure to compete more effectively in the 21st century.
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