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OCR for page 71
Amy Kaslow, Senior Fellow
Council on Competitiveness
The Council on Competitiveness draws its membership from an un-
usual mix of leaders from business, academia, and labor. While that can
mean many disparate views, our members firmly agree upon the need to
compete. And what puts the United States on the leading edge of global
competition is our economy's most important asset: human capital.
From the factory floor to the nation's most sophisticated laboratories,
it is the workers who are engaging in just-in-time training to apply their
newly gained knowledge to ever-changing workplace demands. It's the
talented people who are improving on, creating, and deploying new ideas
and technologies that keep the economy strong. Critical to U.S. competi-
tiveness, of course, is our development of an American science and engi-
neering workforce. We recognize that this development commands the
learning opportunities that spark creativity and help people to develop
. 1 1 ·1 1 . . 1 1 1 1 TO ~ ·1 . · 1 . 1 . -
tne SKlllS tO take on new challenges. it we tall to provide those opportum-
ties, we will never cultivate a dynamic corps of homegrown scientists and
engineers. Why the emphasis on an indigenous workforce? Because it is
expensive and shortsighted to rely so heavily on imported skills.
One of the striking findings from the Council's most recent Competi-
tiveness Index (see www.compete.org) is that the number of innovator
countries is fast growing and they are becoming strong contenders for the
very scientists and engineers American firms have been able to lure. Evi-
dence of global competitiveness in the production of technically trained
workers can be seen in Figures 1-6. Where the research is weak, and
greatly needed, is in determining (1) precisely where the talent pool for
innovator countries is drawn from, and (2) the rates at which foreign sci-
OCR for page 72
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Biological & Agricultural
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FIGURE 1 Growth in U.S. SUE degrees, indexed to 1986.
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FIGURE 2 Ratio of Natural Science and Engineering degrees to the 24-year-old
population, 1999 or latest year available.
OCR for page 73
COUNC~ ON COMPE~S
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FIGURE 3 Researchers per 10,000 workers.
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FIGURE 4 Change in SUE degrees as a percent of first university degrees.
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PAN-~CANIZAHONAL SUMMIT
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FIGURE 5 Foreign doctoral recipients who plan to stay in the U.S., 1999.
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Engineering Physical Mathematical Computer Biological Agricultural
science science science science science
FIGURE 6 Percent of master's & doctorate degrees in SUE earned by foreign citi-
zens by field, 1991 and 2000.
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COUNC~ ON COMPE~S
enlists and engineers are repatriating. We see anecdotal evidence in many
middle-income countries where one of the principal exports is human
capital, and where a stronger economy and more robust innovation are
attracting more of this "export talent" back home. This is a concern, of
course, because American companies will quickly follow in their wake.
Another area we plan to look at more closely is the troubling trend of
American companies producing their intellectual property overseas. It's
an economic necessity if our firms forage for workers abroad, if they set
up operations overseas to meet local demand; it's a national economic
loss if our firms move their creative capacities out of our country.
This, by the way, is where real public-private partnerships make all
the difference in keeping that innovation stateside. Historical successes
like Research Triangle demonstrate the economic power generated by
university, business, and government partnerships. We've documented
and continue to support that nexus on the local, even grassroots, level. We
know that innovation from workforce preparedness to research and de-
velopment is best accomplished community by community (see Win-
ning the Skills Race, a Council on Competitiveness report generated in 1998
after more than a year of field work, task force assessments, and national
meetings to document best practices in bridging the skills and income
gaps among U.S. workers).
The past years' liberalizations of visa restrictions to accommodate em-
ployers' urgent needs have been acts of triage, not strategic planning. They
are a reflection of how short-term the United States has become in its ap-
proach toward a problem with profound, and long-term consequences. The
Council knows that the hardest choice is to make a generational investment
in preparing, and to engage all of the players with a stake in the success of,
a vibrant population of homegrown scientists and engineers. Because with-
out that effort, American companies will continue to go offshore for their
talent, or worse, set up shop abroad and never look back.
The Council strongly argues for building our own American capacity,
but we are not suggesting that the United States operate in a vacuum. As
the Council's university vice chairman and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) president Charles Vest wrote persuasively in a recent
Wall Street Journal op-ed, science is a collective endeavor; it is a global
enterprise of independent and interactive verification of discoveries made
around the world. Knowledge is honed through global dialogue. Dr. Vest
points to European and Asian universities, which together produce more
Ph.D. degrees in science and engineering than U.S. universities. Knowl-
edge creation, and the leadership that flows from it, thrives in openness.
Indeed, Vest warns, they suffer in isolation. Yet if we are to forge these
global ties, we must do so from a strong national base. To do otherwise is
to lose our leadership in innovation.
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The Council supports policy initiatives to sharpen the competitive
edge of American workers in the critical fields of science, engineering,
and math.
· We want to see a far greater diversity of the workforce. We want to
see women and minorities, the fastest-growing segments of the workforce,
transform from being underrepresented in technical occupations to being
the dominant new entrants into the SHE marketplace.
· We support financial incentives for universities to train scientists
and engineers. It's an expensive education, and cost prohibitive to many,
especially for the fastest-growing subsets of the workforce women and
. . .
m~nor~hes.
· We want to see graduate students choose their preferred special-
izations based on market factors and career opportunities, rather than
gravitate to fields where funding just happens to be available.
We also know that K-12 issues are embedded in all of the workforce
policy debates. Although K-12 education is a national priority, the science
and math component merits special attention for several reasons. First,
the demand for technical literacy and independent problem solving in the
workplace puts a premium on math and science education in schools and
not just for students pursuing science and engineering careers. Second,
our democracy requires a population that can understand the scientific
and technical underpinnings of contentious political issues: cloning, glo-
bal warming, energy efficiency, missile defense, and stem cell research, to
name a few. But finally, and most compelling, is the reality that math and
science command special attention because even our best students are
underperforming compared with the rest of the world. The deficiencies rep-
resented in our education achievement that science and math weakness
cuts across all schools, that relatively strong-performing fourth graders
lose a lot of steam by their senior year in high school, that U.S. twelfth
graders score far lower in math and science than their peers in other coun-
tries these deficiencies are well documented.
In addition, the Council supports a number of policy recommenda-
tions to enhance math and science teaching and learning, including im-
portant curriculum changes, more rigorous graduation requirements,
higher teacher pay, more professional development opportunities, and
ways to strengthen the scholastic connection between K-12 and beyond.
The Council has done a great deal of cross-country fieldwork to deter-
mine the most practical, the most cost-efficient, and the most effective
local initiatives to build and broaden the talent pool. We have broken
ground in documenting how local coalitions made up of learning institu-
tions, businesses, workers' advocates, and governments are bridging the
OCR for page 77
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~7
skills and income gaps among U.S. workers. Skills shortages, we quickly
learned, know no borders. They transcend demographics, geography, in-
come levels, and every other divider in American society. We have done a
great deal with clusters, with Council Executive Committee member and
Harvard professor Michael Porter. And now we are embarking on ways
to develop innovation models of so-called underachieving areas around
the country. At present, our focus is on midsized cities such as Akron and
Albuquerque where public-private partnerships go a long way toward
affecting change.
The Council has acted on its commitment to a world-class workforce
by initiating programs like Building Engineering and Science Talent
(BEST), which encourages diversity in the SHE pipelines, and
Getsmarter.org, which strives for excellence in math and science educa-
tion in America's primary and secondary schools. As the economy
becomes more knowledge based, there is a surge in demand for more
knowledge workers. To boost the growth prospects of the science and
engineering workforce, the Council launched BEST in 2001. It's a public-
private partnership designed to identify the best strategies for generating
a more diverse science, engineering, and technical workforce and to bring
these best practices to communities around the country.
One of the more immediate and practical ways we've approached the
K-12 priority is through Getsmarter.org, which is a recent spin-off of the
National Association of Manufacturers. The Council created the interac-
tive Web site to increase students' interest and literacy in science, math-
ematics, and technology. A complementary goal is to provide a useful
resource for parents and teachers. The site offers free, no-risk K-12 self-
assessment for students to instantly compare their performance in science
and mathematics with that of students around the world. They can also
use the entertaining Web portal to gain access to hints, tutorials, and links
to the best Web sites on improving math and science skills. Inspired new
additions to Getsmarter.org include Math and Science Television (MSTV),
a feature that shows high schoolers how relevant math and science are to
their daily lives.
Finally, the Council this year launched a multiyear initiative called
Competitiveness and Security to determine the economic implications of
sudden (and what experts expect will be sustained) investments to make
our society safe. Along with panels of experts, we are examining the roles
of both the public and the private sectors in virtually every sector of the
economy from critical infrastructure to financial services to food safety.
The nation's leading economists will help us to examine the links between
those investments and productivity. And of course, the Council is looking
closely at the impact of security issues on our workforce. These include the
increased pressure put on our incumbent workers to embed security in
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PAN-~CANIZAHONAL SUMMIT
their daily routine, as well as pressures on the composition and move-
ment of the science and engineering workforce that have surfaced in the
current concerns about protecting our country and keeping our universi-
ties open.
The Council on Competitiveness is working on many policy and prac-
tical fronts to make certain the United States has an adequate pipeline of
American scientists and engineers. As we continue to help build it, we are
intent on cultivating partnerships.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
science science
