Perspective: Missing the Cold War

HP Labs director Dick Lampman won't quickly forget the warm thank-you he received from England's Cambridge University.

Because so many foreign students failed to receive study visas for the United States, they were instead matriculating in the U.K. colleges, and Cambridge's vice chancellor was absolutely buoyant about the quality of their educational credentials.

"It was not the high point of my day," Lampman said.

Does it really matter that a few thousand teenagers from the Third World can't study here because of post-Sept. 11 restrictions? Many argue that it does not. After all, the technology business is booming, share prices are climbing, and a few companies even are partying like its 1999. What's past is necessarily prologue.

The absence of a similar challenge of that magnitude has left the U.S. lazy and complacent.

But traveling around Silicon Valley of late, I haven't found many serious thinkers brimming with Panglossian optimism when they assess the state of the technology industry.

Beyond the drop in student visas, they are deeply concerned about a lack of national resolve to deal with what some liken to a gathering storm. In a world where access to knowledge is easier than ever before, they don't assume that the U.S. can retain leadership of the very technology industry it invented.

Consider the following data points, from a report issued last month by the National Academies Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy.

• More than 600,000 engineers graduated from colleges and universities in China last year. For India, the number was 350,000. In the United States, it was a whopping 70,000.

• In a test of 21 countries for general knowledge in math and sciences, 12th graders in this country performed below the international average.

• U.S. industry spent more on tort litigation than on research and development in 2001.

Those are just some of the highlights. If you want to spend a thoroughly depressing afternoon, download and read the rest of the report at your leisure. If current trends continue, we may one day look back to this period as the U.S. era's high watermark.

Boom, zoom to the moon
Hard-core technologists can be excused if they pine for the good old days of the Cold War. After the Russians sent up the Sputnik in 1957, nobody had to explain what would happen to the U.S. if it fell behind the USSR in math and science. Scholarships were created. National attitudes changed. A few years later, John F. Kennedy even challenged America to put a man on the moon. Nobody had to explain the importance of pure technology research.

It's a tougher sell these days. The absence of a similar challenge of that magnitude has left the U.S. lazy and complacent. Google's vice president of engineering, Alan Eustace, is hardly an alarmist. But he, too, is worried about where the signposts are pointing.

As if the growing shortfall in students--born in the U.S. and abroad--with a thorough grounding in mathematics and the sciences was not bad enough. Eustace also bemoans a falloff in funding for nonmilitary technology research in organizations such as the DARPA and the National Science Foundation--as well as in academia.

"Talk to anybody in research in the universities. They are suffering like never before," Eustace said.

As the name suggests, DARPA, an acronym for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is primarily interested in applied research for the Department of Defense. What with our long-term involvement in Iraq, DARPA can make a plausible argument why it's vital to invent bomb-proof flak jackets than to divert its attention. But DARPA is only following the lead set by the leadership in Washington.

You can only neglect things for so long. Speaking earlier this week at a conference organized by TechNet, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr predicted that his kids "will inherit a world that's less good" than the one we now inhabit.

When it comes to predicting technology trends, Doerr's been right more than most of his peers. The problem he sees is that current policy inadvertently works against the tech industry's best interests. While politicians are more concerned with maneuvering for advantage before the next election, they're missing the bigger picture. The impact of the nation's ongoing neglect of the educational system, as well as the falloff in R&D, will become clear soon enough. Throw an increasingly scattershot policy approach toward broadband into the mix, and you have a recipe for mediocrity.

But no matter: We can outsource the hard work to the Indians and Chinese. They're supposed to be pretty good in the natural sciences, aren't they?

Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.

More Perspectives

[Dachi]

How do they afford it?

Before we just write off all Americans as lazy, why don't we look at the cost of going to school here vs some of the other countries where they have 600,000 engineering graduates/year.

Maybe people should be saving up money to go to get their engineering degrees at an English speaking school in China.

The fact that in American High Schools you can miss 20% of the school days, sleep through every classs, rarely study, and still pull B's is just sad. You could probably miss some classes for a month and catch up in a couple days.

Maybe they should let students test out of some classes and begin taking (and paying for) college level classes right at the high school for credit.

This would be good for many reason.

a) It would let the students that do not want to be taught at the speed of the slowest 5% of kids in class move on so they are not bored.

b) Be a source of additional income for the schools (but still cheaper for parents than college)

c) Give the students a huge head start on their degree, some could leave high school with associates degrees of which many standard classes should be able to xfer at least to collages in the same state.

The current system of having some people that work really hard, and others being lazy and giving them both the same thing is not very rewarding and encourages laziness.

In the school I went to, if you take advanced classes you just end up with a ton of study halls and a couple useless electives when you are a senior.

[Joelshouts]

Already happening...

And no, I dont mean AP classes. I'm a graduate from the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School(WPCCS). I spent my highschool freshman year at my traditional high school, but heard about the cyber school, and got excited. I spent my next two years taking online classes through the cyber school; they were fair, but I can't imagine having a better education from my low income area high school. During my senior year, I spent two semesters at a local Community College. I enjoyed my time there, and ended up receiving an associates degree in telecommunications. I'm now a student at the University of Pittsburgh.

There were some downsides, though - many colleges don't like such nontraditional teaching methods, prefering students to be products of the High Schools. One must approach the colleges as a transfer student, and schools limit the ammount of transfer students accepted. I personally think that my Spanish education was horrible through WPCCS, but it is new, and overall I'm satisfied. Many high schools refuse to pay WPCCS (as it is a public school).

Point being, some places are shaking up the American education system, but it is, to be cliche, too little, too late.

[almaurer]

You're right, Charlie

I was "directed" into science/math in the 60s--part of that post-Sputnik trend. My son was thinking of majoring in physics but was told that, after the Cold War, physicists didn't have good job prospects. So he went into computer information systems, where 75% of his fellow majors changed after the dot-com bubble burst.

Don't blame the government, though. Blame industry. You know: the guys who hire overseas because it's cheaper in the short run. This is a market economy; don't expect the government to make up for bad decisions on the part of corporations who can't see beyond the next quarterly statement.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Boo hoo. We can't find enough Computer Scientists in America who are willing to work for $2 per hour. Boo hoo.

As long as the corporations prefer to hire cheap slave labor under the H-1B visa program, American college students will choose to not major in Comp Sci or EE. Right?

In America, college students pay to go. It's not like in some third-world country where the government pays for college (IF you can get in). Therefore, we don't have ridiculous overproduction of Engineers like _some_ places.

The corporations and their shills are like the guy who murdered his parents and then asks for mercy because he's an orphan: Because the corporations have a de facto policy of not hiring American programmers and software engineers, the American college students are choosing to major in law.

I hope they sue you.

[golfzilla]

Kiss it goodbye

American engineers have been living in an economic dreamland
for the past 40 years. The kind of engineering many of these
folks now do is closely related to flipping hamburgers and
Americans think they should earn $100,000/year for it. Those
days are GONE, and they are not coming back. Engineering is a
commodity and will be paid the commodity wages it deserves.

The big companies have been outsourcing because of this.
Initially they were outsourcing jobs that snooty American
engineers thought were beneath them (QA, testing, etc.). What
the companies found out is that these offshore folks can do all
the rest of it as well. Kiss that high paying engineering job,
where you get messages at lunch, play video games, and get
paid big for it, goodbye.

Layoffs and Outsourcing

There is no incentive to go into engineering anymore. This is not
the failure of the education system. Why invest all the time
money and work only to be out-sourced. Companies only care
about the quarterly profit. The long term result of forcing young
people out of engineering is never considered.