Posted on 08/22/2004 12:02:47 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Hidden amid the hoopla of finding planets orbiting other stars, decoding the human genome and discovering miracle materials with nanotechnology, there's a seemingly improbable but perhaps even more important story — U.S. science may be in decline.
After 50 years of supremacy, both scientifically and economically, America now faces formidable challenges from foreign governments that have recognized scientific research and new technology as the fuels of a powerful economy.
"The Chinese government has a slogan, 'Develop science to save the country,' " said Paul Chu, a physics professor at the University of Houston who also is president of Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. "For a long time they have talked about it. Now they are serious."
According to the National Science Foundation and other organizations that track science indicators, the United States' share of worldwide scientific and engineering research publications, Nobel Prize awards, and some types of patents is falling.
A recent trend in the number of foreign students applying to U.S. schools is even more troubling, scientists say.
As American students have become less interested in science and engineering, top U.S. graduate schools have turned increasingly toward Europe and Asia for the best young scientists to fill laboratories. Yet now, with post-Sept. 11 visa rules tightening American borders, fewer foreign students are willing to endure the hassle of getting into the country.
"Essentially, the United States is pushing the best students from China and other countries away," Chu said.
The new restrictions also hassle students who are already here, like Lijun Zhu, a physics graduate student at Rice University since 1998 who returned two years ago to China to get married. The honeymoon became a nightmare when he and his new wife were stranded for more than two months, awaiting visa renewals.
"I was afraid of going outside my home for even a moment and missing the call from the consulate," Zhu recalled.
Losing future students like Zhu would cost more than just prestige in ivory towers. It could very well mean losing the nation's technological leadership, with implications for the nation's job market and security, to say nothing of culture.
Decline called 'ridiculous' Although President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, dismisses as "ridiculous" the notion that America could lose its scientific prestige, scientists and policy-makers lay the blame in several areas: the drying well of foreign students, limited stem cell research and less federal funding for basic science research.
Since the visa restrictions were tightened in 2002, foreign-student applications to U.S. universities have fallen from 400,000 a year to 325,000, a 19 percent drop. Graduate school applications nationally are down even further, by up to 40 percent, said Jordan Konisky, vice provost for research and graduate studies at Rice University.
The problem, he said, is that when additional screening requirements were added, extra staffing in U.S. consulates to handle the workload was not.
And the atmosphere in these foreign offices, simmering with tension from terrorism's threat, breeds caution.
"No bureaucrat wants to make a mistake and approve a visa for someone that comes to this country and causes a problem," Konisky said. "So they tend to be very conservative about this, and that's good. But I think they're being overly conservative."
Graduate science programs at Rice and elsewhere are heavily dependent on foreign students.
Nearly half of engineering graduate students are foreign, as are more than one-third of all natural sciences graduate students.
These students invigorate research, professors say. They publish papers, bring new ideas and play a major role in patent applications.
Afraid to leave the U.S. In 2003, the Rice graduate physics program admitted 16 foreign students. Two were delayed more than six months, and three were permanently blocked from entering the United States. Southern Methodist University has a smaller program, and in 2002, the two foreign students who were accepted didn't get visas. School officials briefly considered ending the program, but enough students gained visas in 2003 and this fall to keep it open, said Fredrick Olness, the SMU physics department chairman.
Yet even if students make it into the United States, their visa troubles, as evidenced by the plight of Zhu, aren't over.
Scientific conferences are held worldwide, and many students with families or looming deadlines at school opt not to travel for fear that they won't be able to come back. Likewise, meeting planners say the number of foreign scientists attending conferences in the United States has dropped because they don't want to bother with obtaining a temporary visa.
Then there are the physicists who want to work at some of the world's best particle accelerators, which are in Switzerland and Germany.
"All of the foreign faculty we have are afraid to leave the country because of visa problems," Olness said. "If this keeps up, the United States is going to take a hit on its stature in the worldwide physics community."
Seizing the opportunity Marburger, himself a physicist, said changes to streamline visa problems, including adding staff in U.S. consular offices abroad, should be announced soon.
"This has very high visibility in Washington, all the way up to the president," Marburger said.
The winner, for now at least, is clear — scientific enterprise everywhere else.
At Hong Kong University, applications from Chinese students have more than doubled in the past three years. Chu says his faculty is thrilled.
Chu said Great Britain and Australia have seized the opportunity and opened recruiting offices in China. The European Union, too, has set a goal of having the most competitive and knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.
What concerns U.S. scientists is that a decades-long brain drain into America may be coming to an end.
America began attracting scientists in the 1930s when the shadow of Hitler's political and religious persecution fell over Europe. Hordes of leading scientists such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, whose work with nuclear chain reactions led to the atomic bomb, immigrated to the United States.
Focus on science funding After the war, the United States began spending billions of dollars on basic and defense-related research. Other great foreign scientists followed, drawn to new facilities and money. Their work laid the foundation for the technology bonanza of the 1990s, when one-third of Silicon Valley start-up companies were begun by foreigners.
Attracting top graduate students from other countries, then, is the first step toward continuing the trend.
"The United States used to welcome foreign scientists," said Zhu's adviser at Rice, physics professor Qimiao Si. "Nearly a century ago, the center of gravity shifted to the United States. We don't want that to happen in a reverse direction."
There are other policy areas that U.S. scientists say harm their ability to compete. Scientists say the Bush administration's policy to limit the use of embryonic stem cells will blunt advances made in biomedical research. "The stem cell decision has certainly put us behind at the front end of the curve," said Neal Lane, Clinton's science adviser. "It's a huge barrier."
The president's decision also led some U.S. researchers to seek private funds for their work. But this, said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, usually a stalwart ally of Bush, is no solution to the issue.
"It's the federal research that is the big opportunity," the Texas senator said. "That's where the big dollars are. And to have these avenues to federal resources closed is going to hurt us in the long run."
Another problem, said Albert Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is an increasing focus in the federal budget on applied military and homeland security research. Excluding a modest increase for biomedical research, nondefense research and development in the proposed 2005 federal budget would decline 2.1 percent, according to the association.
Marburger said federal science spending is still far greater than in any other country. The United States, he said, spends 1 1/2 times more on research and development than all of the European Union countries combined.
Teich agreed, but only to a point.
"It is probably wrong to say U.S. science is currently in decline," he said. "But it is certainly in danger of declining. We're perched on the edge."
Another troubling trend A fundamental problem, scientists and policy-makers say, is the lack of interest in science from American children.
Between 1994 and 2001, the number of U.S. students enrolling in science and engineering graduate programs fell 10 percent. Foreign enrollment jumped by 31 percent to make up for the shortfall.
National reports on this trend have offered suggestions to address the problem, such as giving money to community colleges to assist high-ability students in transferring to four-year science and engineering programs.
"Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet," said President Clinton's science adviser, Neal Lane.
Although there are some encouraging trends — the number of U.S. Hispanics enrolling in science graduate programs between 1994 and 2001 increased by more than one-third — the number of U.S. minorities in science graduate programs remains well below their representation in the total population.
Is it? What if American graduate schools stopped over-producing PhDs, which they can do because more than half the engineering and math PhDs awarded in the US are given to foreign nationals? Then more Americans might go into graduate schools in science, math and engineering. Right now, a typical starting salary for a PhD in math in academia is in the 40s. That's pretty small money for that level of expertise. New business prof salaries are in the 60s or 70s. Salaries in math are that small only because there are too many PhDs on the market in that discipline.
Despite the feminist fantasies, it is mostly boys who pursue these science and engineering degrees.
For the last decade or so, close to 30% of the new PhDs in math in the US have been awarded to women. My own discipline in mathematics, wavelet analysis (an important new area in applied math), was revolutionized by a woman, Prof. Ingrid Daubechies of Princeton University.
Outsourcing. Why assume a crushing debt to get a degree in a field in which you will probably never get a job?
I'm not saying it's smart to give up, but I don't know what I'd tell a kid to major in these days. I'm glad I'm not facing that decision. It's the toughest call that it's ever been. It used to be a slam dunk that if you were any good at science and wanted to work in it that you should at least look into it. Now it's not at all clear.
In computer science - my field - a lot of graduate students are foreign, yes. I don't know a single one who plans to "go home" when he's done. Most of them aren't getting financial support, either. Their tuition helps pay for my assistantship.
So when we're done, I'll be competing with "foreigners", yes; but foreigners who have been in this country for years and are largely acclimated, who want to work for the same wage, not less. And apparently there's no lack of jobs for CS Ph.Ds - I understand the starting salary right now is around $90,000 - that's not an indicator of an overfed market.
It's a fallacy that you have to go into debt to get an advanced degree in the sciences. I don't know any American student in my department (at a graduate level) who's paying tuition. Most of us have assistantships that pay a stipend. I'm in CS, but I understand it's the same way for many of the science fields.
Of course, if you want a Ph.D in, say, English Literature, be prepared to pay through the nose. When they take away my stipend, then I'll think that maybe we don't have a demand for Ph.Ds any more.
I'm just relaying anecdotal evidence, and it's only for one field, but I'm sure it's true for CS because I just spent a year looking at various universities with graduate programs. Pretty much all of them are the same way.
Also - the recent downturn in the economy, particularly in the tech sector, is good for creating American Ph.Ds. When the economy's really hot and you can get a good job right out of college, why go to grad school? But when it's not great, you might as well get your MS or Ph.D. So there were probably more applicants two years ago than there will be next year, which means more advanced degrees are in the pipeline right now.
Don't tell me anecdotal evidence about individuals. It is a fact of Nature that the outliers on the intelligence bell curve are overwhelmingly male. Our outliers on the high end are being systematically suppressed. This has consequences, and will have more consequences as time goes on.
The whole purpose of the article, of course, is about stem cell research.
Cash-and-Kerry thinks he invented science. Bush caveman. Bush no fund science. Ug. Make people pay for own science. Ug.
offshoring of tech jobs is causing this. who wants to go to college for an engineering degree, to compete with $30K per year workers in India and China. You need to look no further then this, to find out why this is happening.
All of my engineer friends with children - are piling their kids into law school.
no way are there large numbers of CS PHd entry level jobs at $90K floating around out there. you are dreaming. its becoming a niche market in the US, the top graduates from the top schools like MIT may be getting those jobs - but few others are.
True -- one of the bright spots in science. But starting academic salaries in most bio and chem is similiar to math, in the 40s. Another hot area is bioinformatics, and more generally, statistics.
It is not a fact of nature that the outliers are overwhelmingly male. Without ego I may say that as a holder of a mathematics PhD I am an outlier on the bell curve -- and so are all the other recent PhDs in math, 29% of whom are female.
And I don't buy the claim that male outliers are being suppressed: the number of Americans getting PhDs in math has fluctuated in the 400 - 600 range per year for decades, 70-75% male throughout.
A: When you state that outliers are overwhelmingly male, she comes back with, "That's not true. I am one of almost 30% who are female."
Do you know how many Ph.Ds in computer science are granted each year? The last statistic I saw was, around 800. A good percentage of those go into teaching. The supply is lower than the demand.
Hence, the Space Shuttle and "Who gets to ride next? The Pakistani? The First Hispanic is space? The first Israeli?" going nowhere, doing nothing, costing trillions, lab experiments in low orbit that would embarrass a sophomore in a high school science fair.
The only good space science has happened "under the radar" at jpl, and has never rec'd the funding or attn it deserved, if space exploration was what we wanted. But we still got a lot of exploring and science for the little we spent there.
If the emphasis had been different in the late seventies...who knows? We might have made it to Mars (with human footprints) by now.
Didn't know this Pres has a science advisor. What was the context of his remark?
Is 70% overwhelming? It might be so in a political election, but among mathematicians or bass players it might not.
I think it's fair to suggest that until about 25 years ago, mathematics was considered to be a male game. Girls were often told they didn't need four years of math in high school (which of course shuts off most scientific research as a career option). Non-traditional (read: older) students of mine have told me this happened to them. By now, in the early 21st century, cultural and legal barriers to women in mathematics and related fields have dropped away. Whether the percentage of PhDs given to women in mathematics (or related fields) evens up to 50% over time is hard to tell. But it's already up to 29%; I wouldn't call 71% male "overwhelming". I am willing to grant you that men are more visual/spatial/logical than women, but I don't think the difference is that great. It might be that eventually 60% of PhDs in math happen to go to men, or maybe 65%. But there are plenty of women in this biz, and many of them are very good.
When I was in college (late 70s) there was a big poster on the wall in the math department: Great Men of Mathematics. (This was produced by IBM if memory serves.) It was detailed and fascinating. And it is true that nearly all the great mathematicians on this poster were male. One of the several females on the poster was Emmy Noether. (Noether was a primary architect of modern abstract algebra; the importance of her work cannot be overstated.) The poster described her as "fat, rough and loud", and her German colleagues referred to her as "Der Noether" (employing the masculine article). On the other hand, in an earlier post, I mentioned Ingrid Daubechies. I've met her, she's rather feminine in her personal presentation.
I can't help mentioning, but years ago, I saw a presentation by Sheila Tobias, author and popularizer of the notion of math anxiety, especially pertaining to girls. I was bemused by her consistent mispronunciation of the name Noether as "No-ther" (the correct pronunciation is more like "Ner-ter").
By the way, in case you're wondering about megatherium, this giant ground sloth is the proud owner of a Y chromosome.
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