We've been seeing this statement for 40 years. Fat lot of good it did.
Why should American "young people" spend 4 years and $$$ jumping thru all the math hoops, just to see H1B Visa muzzies and other foreigners taking over all U.S. technology jobs for stagnant wages ?
As a former engineer, I saw it happen multiple times and places since 2008.
Continuing the NASA monopoly on space exploration makes no more sense today than it would to have them to run all the airlines.
Bezos and Musk are the today's hope for space travel. And as for scientific research / explorataion, let the universities, billionaires, and private foundations manage and fund it.
.
Exactly right. You are one of the very few people that I've heard speak to this simple reality. Most of the time, we get hypocritical nonsense from the Chamber of Commerce/Business Roundtable crowd whose singular interest is to fill the nation's office cubicles with foreign-born workers willing to do "STEM" work for Third World wages.
Why shouldn't, then, the native-born "best and the brightest" just go to law school, or otherwise follow-the-money?
“We’ve been seeing this statement for 40 years. Fat lot of good it did.”
We need another “Sputnik” moment.
Worked then.
That's a shibboleth. The engineers who sent men to the moon went to school from the 1930s to the 1950s.
I'm sure they studied (duh!) - but they also had proper preparation in elementary school and high school, they had proper grading and a rigorous curriculum.
None of that exists any more. One of my children is currently a Biology major in college. This child has two "X" chromosomes, so that's very exciting to the powers that be.
The lack of preparation among her classmates is astonishing. The degraded nature of the curriculum is astonishing. Neither of these things can be corrected by "studying".
If we are going to send English speakers to Mars, we have to fix first grade, and we won't be going for fifty years (at least). When I was a little boy and a teenager, I believed we'd hear voices from Mars before I died.
And we will. Too bad I don't speak Mandarin.