Posted on 05/06/2004 9:06:00 AM PDT by Junior
WASHINGTON - The United States could lose its prominence in the fields of science and technology because of rising competition for foreign talent, a National Science Foundation (news - web sites) report says.
"For many years we have benefited from minimal competition in the global science and engineering labor market, but attractive and competitive alternatives are now expanding around the world," said National Science Board Chairman Warren Washington.
The report, released Tuesday, said more and more foreign-born scientists and engineers joined American scientific work force in the 1990s. Immigrants made up 38 percent of science and engineering employees with doctorate degrees in 2000, while immigrants made up 29 percent of those with master's degrees.
The science board said America risks losing the foreign scientists it relies on to fill technology jobs because of unclear immigration demands since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and because more countries are developing programs to keep their highly-educated citizens.
America also lags other nations in the number of students majoring in science and engineering at colleges and universities, according to the board.
Twenty-four nations in 2000 awarded a higher percentage of science and engineering degrees to students than the United States. The United States awarded 5.7 science degrees per 100 24-year-olds, compared with a ratio of 13.2 to 100 in Finland, which awarded the highest proportion, the report said.
The board warned that a loss in the number of foreign-born scientists who want to work in the United States would hurt the technology sector at a time when many of its most-educated employees are nearing retirement.
"Many of those who entered the expanding science and engineering work force in the 1960s and 1970s (the baby boom generation) are expected to retire in the next 20 years, and their children are not choosing careers in science and engineering in the same numbers as their parents," the board said in comments accompanying the report. It noted that the number of jobs requiring scientific skills increases steadily by 5 percent each year.
"Preparation of the science and engineering work force is a vital arena for national competitiveness," it said.
The National Science Foundation is a federal agency based in Arlington, Va. It releases the report every two years. The National Science Board, a 24-member panel, oversees the foundation.
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On the Net:
National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/
Not in a free society, we don't.
I chalk it up to lack of rigor in the elementary/secondary educations.
Both of these statements have merit. My expirience is that teachers lack the background in the subject they're teaching to be able present them rigorously. Math is an excellent example. When a kid asks, honestly or not, "What will I use this for?", most math teachers haven't a clue. "To pass the test" is an incredibly lame sanswer.
There are numerous root causes for the entire problem. Repairing the situation is not going to be an easy process.
I guess it falls to me, as the bearer of my screen name, to speak up for good ol' PH. To begin with, it's Patrick Henry College, not University. Then, there's the matter of what they purport to teach. From their website: Patrick Henry College, they have only a Department of Government and a Department of Classical Liberal Arts. Not yet an educational collosus.
The website says: "Students majoring in Government may choose from three tracks--Public Policy, Journalism, and the most recent addition, Strategic Intelligence. ..." Liberal Arts offers majors in Literature and History. "The Literature major has two tracks--Masterworks and Creative and Professional Writing."
Anyway, they're not a science or engineering school. And I don't see any biology being offered. So PH doesn't bother me at all. I might add that we've had, to my knowledge, two Presidents who were trained as engineers: Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. (Whatever that proves.)
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