Intel CEO: U.S. faces looming tech decline
news.cnet.com
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Being a fan of using specificity where it should be used, especially when solving problems (generalization is such a killer, love the phrase 'root cause analysis'), i would say the policy makers and such industry leaders should be more specific about what part of the education system it is that has broken down.
When they are more specific, there is a higher chance of citizens understanding exactly what is the problem and throwing their weight behind measures to solve those problems.
Having been exposed to two very different education systems (US and India), and education being one of my favorite topics for analysis (err....nothing serious, just armchair analysis) this is how I would characterize this issue:
American universities are of very high standard (cannot emphasize that enough). They are of such a high standard that American schools (primary education) are not able to provide enough input (students) of the required high standard.
Students come to the universities, unable to take the pressure and stress that the high standards of the universities put, they downgrade their goals or still, start off with less tougher fields as goals. And of course the less tough fields aren't usually science and engineering, which is requried to keep the technological and manufacturing leadership of a country.
Now don't get me wrong, non-engineering fields are also critical to a society, but end of the day, enough of BOTH are required.
On the other hand, in education systems like that of India, the quality of knowledge (as in providing the latest and greatest knowledge) is horrible. But they make up for it by putting the students to such stress and forcing them to learn to perform and strive in that stress ( of course not all do, but the high base volumes puts out enough output), that they can strive anywhere, not the least in American universities.
So, one supply route, American schools (primary) has been struggling to keep up the demand for science based students in American universities which in turn is a supplier to the American industry.
Now, the immigration policies are creating another bottleneck for the American industry. With such a drying up of supply routes, no doubt American industry will face challenges in keeping up its technological leadership.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't find fault with Americans or Indians. Baring the outliers, I strongly believe the average person is a product of the system and its the system that needs to be changed, tweaked or whatever. ( of course systems themselves are an accumulation of people's desires, thoughts, opinions and decisions over time)
The American education system has supported American industry well so far, but there is a book called "Who moved my cheese".
America would do well to make its primary school system require more hardwork so that students get aclimatised to more hardwork required at the higher education level, not to mention that required in the industry.
India would do well to inject more arts into its school systems, not to mention more contemporary technology ( and not just in computers!)
With the very little exposure I got about the Chinese system (through chinese classmates), I think their's is sort of in between the Indian and American systems, but closer to the Indian system than to the American system
One thing I'd add are the forces of supply and demand. Here are my facts/observations about those in the US:
I'm not sure about other STEM professions, but the demand for programmers skyrocketed in the '80s with the supply of capable and necessarily cheap microprocessor based computers. It's hard to express what a sea change this was, from wiring together discrete logic to being able to put an entire CPU on a single chip which massively decreased cost, increased reliability and in time allowed for very high preformance (compared to their discrete ECL high end competitors; for the most extreme example the initial Cray-1 announced in 1975 ran at 80MHz).
At the same time semiconductor DRAM allowed an explosion in the size of programs and all together these allowed an orders of magnitude preformance escape from the constraints that had been with us since, say, the very early 60s.
There were a variety of supply based responses to this including the 1990s? H1-B visa program; their success can be judged by the inflation adjusted wages earned by programmers and the post-dot.com crash in CS major enrollment (don't know about other schools but MIT lost more than half, in a department that had had steady and very high enrollment (40% of the undergraduates) since the beginning of the '80s or earlier).
I was personally on the science track in the late '70s (high school and first term of college) and I could by the end of that decade see the supply of biologists starting to outstrip the demand. Chemistry might be weird since it became politically unfashionable by the end of the '60s, but physics certainly had an oversupply by the time that the US Superconducting Super Collier was canceled in 1993 (at least one MIT department had a line of students transferring out of the physics department into it on that day).
Yet starting sometime in the '80s the NSF began a major "We don't have enough STEM workers!" campaign that continues to this day. Similarly we see executives like Bill Gates and Intel's CEOs (not just this one) demanding more foreign workers at a time of high unemployment and wage stagnation at best in the fields they're recruiting from. One should also note that the last time I checked Intel has a policy of firing the "bottom" 1/10 of their employees every year so if they're still doing that (and officially or not, it would have become part of their culture) their annual recruiting requirements will therefore be rather extreme.
(That said, the very best are always scarce and hard to find, recruit and retain, but that relative handful is not what we or they are talking about.)
Anyway, I believe that due to the above supply and demand mismatches, prior to the start of the Great Recession the US was seeing a major drop in US originated students in STEM college majors (by that I mean not including say the children of 1st generation immigrants who often weren't clued into these major shifts, I'm assuming 2nd generation and beyond recognized what was happening) and it was far worse in graduate programs.
Of course the Great Recession is looking to be a great game changer as ones often are. STEM careers may suck, but they could easily beat paying out of your own pocket for a law degree in a market that's crashed or for a doctor's education when we're at the brink of a "fundamental transformation" of America's medical system that includes a major obsession with decreasing costs (as it is, the government is already paying for almost half the nation's medical care...).
I had some rethoughts about the above analysis and think there is so much more to it than what I have put up there. In spite of me rambling against generalization, I might have done exactly just that up there.
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If there is enough funding, facilities and ideas, what is it that would be a bottleneck for research?
Large numbers of people qualified at the PhD level
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If there is enough funding What would be a bottleneck for the creation of a large number of PhDs?
Lack of a large numbers of people qualified at the Master's level
or / and
Giving the Master's level people enough motivation not to move to the PhD level, such as well paying jobs. Putting the supply - demand principle to use here, the lesser the number of Master's level people compared to demand, relatively, higher is the salary and their motivation to stick to that level.
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What would be a bottleneck for the creation of a large number of people qualified at the Master's level.
Lack of a large numbers of people qualified at the Bachelor's level
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What would be a bottleneck for the creation of a large number of people qualified at the bachelor's level?
1) Lack of enough students to fill up the openings in universities
a) for not being qualified enough or not 'upto it' (this is what I assumed in the previous analysis)
b) inability to bear the expenses
c) inability to meet the commitment requirements (for some, if they can't visualize the benefits, 4 years of struggling life can be a huge commitment)
2) Lack of enough openings in the universities for even qualified students. (Somehow I don't think, at least most, universities are finding it difficult to fill at the bachelor's level)
3) Lack of enough support and encouragement (at workplace) for incremental addition of qualifications over time towards bachelor level qualifications ( hmm, would I be right in thinking the Unions of yore are partly to blame here, by demanding pay structures that take away the attraction of incremental addition of qualifications, at least in the mechanical/manufacturing fields?)
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I think, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2, 3 and the other causes mentioned in the prior analysis, all of them, contribute to this situation, to different extent in different parts of the country, of not having a strong enough supply of people qualified at the Bachelors.
hmm, I wonder how load balancing can be put to work here, so that the incidence of #2 happens less and the throughput is high?