US losing to India in Science

Indian Express ^ | 10 july 2005 | Retuers

[voletti]

More than half a century of US dominance in science and engineering may be slipping as America's share of graduates in these fields falls relative to Europe and developing nations such as China and India, a study released on Friday says.

The study, written by Richard Freeman at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, warned that changes in the global science and engineering job market may require a long period of adjustment for US workers.

Moves by international companies to move jobs in information technology, high-tech manufacturing and research and development to low-income developing countries were just "harbingers" of that longer-term adjustment, Freeman said.

Urgent action was needed to ensure that slippage in science and engineering education and research, a bulwark of the US productivity boom and resurgence during the 1990s, did not undermine America's global economic leadership, he added.

The United States has had a substantial lead in science and technology since World War Two. With just 5 per cent of the world's population, it employs almost a third of science and engineering researchers, accounts for 40 per cent of research and development spending and publishes 35 per cent of science and engineering research papers.

Many of the world's top high-tech firms are American, and government spending on defense-related technology ensures the US military's technological dominance on battlefields.

But the roots of this lead may be eroding, Freeman said.

Numbers of science and engineering graduates from European and Asian universities are soaring while new degrees in the United States have stagnated -- cutting its overall share.

[voletti]

The picture among doctorates -- key to advanced scientific research -- was more striking. In 2001, universities in the European Union granted 40 per cent more science and engineering doctorates than the United States, with that figure expected to reach nearly 100 per cent by about 2010, the study showed.

Hey, the US remains ing coz it attracts the best of the best from all over the world. So its 35% of published papers actually encompass the top 30% of cutting edge research being done. The best of the PhDs from elsewhere landup here.

The study said deteriorating opportunities and comparative wages for young science and engineering graduates has discouraged US students from entering these fields, but not those born in other countries.

This is the real piece of disturbiing news. Competition not in numbers of degrees awarded but in opportunities offered to the cream of the degreeholders. And this is where I fear, given our budget cuts in Scitech R&D, we may eventually lose out.

[Sender]

Phase I of the takeover is complete; have all technology products manufactured in low-wage, anti-Western countries.

Phase II is nearing completion; have all tech support and customer service outsourced to low-wage countries.

Phase III is underway; have all advanced engineering, design and software coding moved to low-wage countries.

Then the only thing Americans will be allowed to do is to buy their products, at big American prices. But we won't have the big American incomes with which to do so.

This last could be the 'achilles heel' of the Eastern economic takeover; once the American consumer buying market is lost, who are they gonna sell all those cell phones and laptops and laser pointers to? Europe? Africa? Each other?

[stockpirate]

Percentages are misleading, I think (IMHO) he fact that alot of them come to the US and work for US firms here and overseas is much more telling.

The marketplace is becoming more global in its scope.

I seem to remember not too long ago the sky is falling crowd was telling the world that Japan's management style was going to leave us in the dust!

Well, we can't see the dust because we haven't looked back yet, the dust is our own.

[DoctorMichael]

They also won't allow their students to be taught nonsensical crap like Creationism.

[austinite]

The study said deteriorating opportunities and comparative wages for young science and engineering graduates has discouraged US students from entering these fields, but not those born in other countries.

Anybody majoring in Engineering at this time is in for a rude shock upon graduation. I wouldn't recommend it.

Q. Why do our politians want the US to be a third world country?

A. Because an affluent middle class is so hard to manage. They demand things. Better get rid of them.

[razoroccam]

Fascinating and somewhat related story in BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4650065.stm

[Seamoth]

Ah, but creationism is NOT taught in public schools, yet. People pick it up outside of school, because their own public school science education is so inadequate that it can be mowed down by creationist strawmen.

One way to remedy this situation would be to teach the sciences in proper order: first physics, then chemistry, then biology. In many schools biology is the only required "science"... parentheses added because only a caricature of biology (basically environmentalist scaremongering and an overly simplistic version of evolution) can be taught without a physics or chemistry background.

[darth]

In my Economics classes they defined the inputs to building the wealth of a country as Land (natural resources), Labor (which includes human capital, e.g., advanced degrees), Capital, and Entrepreneurship. If the Saudis called up and wanted to send a few tankers of free crude, we would accept, right? Well, its the same with educated people. We should be advertising and subsidizing the move to America of the talented, educated immigrants as well as welcoming foreign entrepreneurs with open arms. The Brain Drain enriched our country and should continue to do so.

[From many - one.]

I semi-agree.

Basic physics should be started in first grade.

Anyone here feel free to steal this idea: a physics playground where the seesaws are designed with seats at varying distances from the fulcrum, slides have varying angles, swings have markers to show pendulum effects etc.

But biological sciences need to start early too. It's a different kind of thinking...which is an unexplored reason why it is so hard to teach the "bio-logic" behind evolution.

Chemistry is magic until kids are older, say 10 or 12.

[DoctorMichael]

".......yet........"

[Involuntary Shudder]

".........proper order..........environmentalist scaremongering........."

I agree with both your 'order' and 'critique'.

[The Duke]

More and cheaper engineers mean that we can solve problems that we previously couldn't afford to solve. The challenge is for 1st world technicians to become the visionaries that guide their 2nd world counterparts.

What only large companies could afford to do in years past individuals will be able to do in the future.

[nairBResal]

bttt

[snarks_when_bored]

For contemplation purposes, here are the names of physicists with pre-prints published at lanl.archiv.org on the current first page of the 'High Energy Physics - Theory' list:

Sumit R. Das   Stefano Giusto   Samir D. Mathur   Yogesh Srivastava   Xinkai Wu   Chengang Zhou   Alexander Westphal   Koji Hashimoto   Seiji Terashima   Ling Bao   Viktor Bengtsson   Martin Cederwall   Bengt E.W. Nilsson   Alejandro Gaona   J. Antonio Garcia   Gaetano Bertoldi   Nick Dorey   N. Kiriushcheva   S.V. Kuzmin   Tadakatsu Sakai   Shigeki Sugimoto   E. R. Bezerra de Mello   A.Marshakov   Yastoshi Takayama   Asato Tsuchiya   Eric Bergshoeff   Renata Kallosh   Amir-Kian Kashani-Poor   Dmitri Sorokin   Alessandro Tomasiello   Mariusz P. Dabrowski   Tomasz Denkiewicz   David Blaschke   Micha Berkooz   Zohar Komargodski   Dori Reichmann   Vasim Shpitalnik   D. Mauro   Tadashi Takayanagi   M. Buric   J. Madore   Henrique Boschi-Filho   Nelson R. F. Braga   Hector L. Carrion   Chong-Sun Chu   Olaf Lechtenfeld   Leopoldo A. Pando Zayas   Diana Vaman   S. Bourouaine   A. Benslama   Bruno Durin   Boris Pioline   Duiliu-Emanuel Diaconescu   Bogdan Florea   Yuji Tachikawa   Giuseppe Milanesi   Martin O'Loughlin   T. Banks   L. Mannelli   W. Fischler   C. Gonera   P.Kosinski   P.Maslanka   S.Giller   P. Baseilhac   K. Koizumi   M.A.L. Capri   V.E.R. Lemes   R.F. Sobreiro   S.P. Sorella   R. Thibes   Giulio Bonelli   Maxim Zabzine   Ivan Calvo   Fernando Falceto   M.I. Krivoruchenko   A.A. Raduta   Amand Faessler   D. Grasso   I.N. McArthur    Machiko Hatsuda    D.M. Gitman   P.Yu.Moshin   A.A. Reshetnyak    Tarun Biswas    Paul H. Frampton    Rui M.G. Reis   Richard J. Szabo    Hans Jockers    Ralph Blumenhagen   Gabriele Honecker   Timo Weigand    Yu Nakayama   Soo-Jong Rey   Yuji Sugawara    Jorge Martinez   Claudio Meneses   José A. Zapata    Bert Schroer    Leonardo Rastelli   Martijn Wijnholt    Jaume Gomis   Joaquim Gomis   Kiyoshi Kamimura    P.S. Howe   U. Lindstrom   V. Stojevic    G.W. Gibbons   M.J. Perry   C.N. Pope    Ralf Hofmann    Vladimir Dzhunushaliev Harald Dorn   George Jorjadze    Harald Grosse   Michael Wohlgenannt    Hyeonjoon Shin   Kentaroh Yoshida    Kourosh Nozari   Mojdeh Karami    Dimitra Karabali    Paolo Benincasa   Alex Buchel   Andrei O. Starinets    Antonio S. de Castro    Ji-Feng Yang    Andrzej Herdegen    Robert J. Finkelstein    A. C. Cadavid   S.A. Frolov   R. Roiban   A.A. Tseytlin    J. W. Moffat    Luiz C de Albuquerque    Neil D. Lambert   Gregory W. Moore    Herbert W. Hamber   Ruth M. Williams    Ferdinando Gliozzi    G. L. Comer    Atish Dabholkar   Frederik Denef   Gregory W. Moore   Boris Pioline    Delia Schwartz-Perlov   Ken D. Olum    R. Loll    W. Westra    S. Zohren    Nejat T. Yilmaz    Alex Kehagias   Constantina Mattheopoulou   N. A. Gromov   V. V. Kuratov    Nejat T. Yilmaz    Tekin Dereli   Nejat T. Yilmaz    Ruth Durrer   

Some of these folks are at American universities, but that won't necessarily continue to be true if our researchers and facilities deteriorate.

[neutrino]

The trends in the article are real. Go to the college of science at any reasonably good university and take a look at the students pursuing graduate degrees in technical fields - you'll find Indians, Chinese - and few Americans.

Once, those foreign students stayed in the U.S. after graduation; now they depart. So we're training the competition.

[WorkingClassFilth]

The downside to opening our graduate schools to foreign students is that 1) they are not Americans, and 2) even if they are naturalized, their allegiances often are somewhere else. The reality is that a super-class of technocrats has evolved who know no national boundaries in their education, loyalties or job opportunities. They are, in effect, privateers without deck or cannon.

In a former job at a University, my department was run by an Indian who was married to a tenured German. The slim majority of the tenured teaching staff were foreign nationals and all but one of the graduate slots were taken by students from China, India and the former Soviet bloc.

One can imagine that this is the best thing for America since they are the "best of the best" but that is more the desire of the research professors talking than anything else. If people ARE Americans (natural born or not) then I'm OK with that, but one MUST take into account the fact that many foreign families groom their children to go this route and send their children wherever Western benevolence will take them in knowing that they will have the best that the West has to offer in the end. In my opinion, America needs mediocre engineering talent that would be provided with Americans filling American graduate school slots. There is a fundamental problem with the short-term reasoning that has led us to this kind of dilema.

In effect, we a outsourcing our intellectual capital. I could be wrong, though. Maybe this will work out as well for all of us as our betters in Washington said NAFTA and GATT would, eh?

[A. Pole]

The study said deteriorating opportunities and comparative wages for young science and engineering graduates has discouraged US students from entering these fields

Science and especially engineering is not a good career choice in USA - there is little job security and it harder to keep family together/raise children than for those in the military (the last has extensive safety net compensating for the frequent relocations)

Much better choice is law. BTW how many lawyers are in Congress and how many engineers or scientists?

"best of the best from all over the world", "the cream of the degreeholders".

The society cannot be based on the "best" and on the "cream". It has to allow the middle to prosper. Calvinist guilt manipulation is not helpful in this matter.

[Seamoth]

Anyone here feel free to steal this idea: a physics playground

That's a great idea! Of course, hardly anyone would take the risk to build a playground these days, thanks to lawyers... sigh.

You're right that there's a lot about biology that can be taught before chemistry, but you'll eventually need chemistry to fully grok high-school-level biology (and evolution by extension). YEC also sneaks in through geology & astronomy, so a little of each should be thrown in for a solid science education. At the high school level, astronomy could be co-taught with more advanced physics.

However, before we can argue over the minutae, we'd have to somehow get rid of all the bleeding heart educators who are responsible for lowering standards in the first place...

[From many - one.]

I remember Sputnik. This is one kind of problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.

The reason is that most scientists can think of nothing they'd like more than doing more of what they are already doing: research.

Fund grad school science education with more scholarships and we'll get more students.


The only additional feature needed is pressure to get scientists, real ones, into the elementary through high school classrooms.

[raybbr]

What the heck does Creationism have to do with outsourcing engineering and technical research to China?

[wouldntbprudent]

Interesting, but I was intrigued that anyone would use "Chindia" in a title---and they didn't!