The number of science and engineering students in the United States peaked in the early 1990s. Despite substantial population growth and a big influx of foreign students, our country is producing fewer scientists and engineers. Why is this a problem? Economic growth comes from technological innovation. A lot of wealth can be skimmed off by managers, lawyers, etc. (e.g., Carly Fiorina, the CEO of HP, majored in medieval history as an undergrad) but the wealth is created to begin with by engineers and scientists.
Why don’t Americans want to study engineering and science? Look at today’s newspaper. Chances are that you’ll find stories about Shiite clerics, Islamic fundamentalism, illiterate warring tribes in Third World nations, government bureaucrats directing American forces in benighted corners of the globe, etc. These might inspire young readers to study medieval history, Islam circa 680 AD (when the Shiites began hating the Sunnis and vice versa), and law or government. But when our enemies are essentially pre-industrial it is tough to see how engineering and science could be central to American society’s needs.
It was not always so. Consider World War II, one of the fastest periods of technological innovation. Our enemies were the Japanese and Germans, who were sophisticated enough to, during WWII, develop novel communications codes (inspired the development of electronic computers), state-of-the-art airplanes (inspired the development of RADAR), state-of-the-art submarines (inspired the development of SONAR, the mapping of the seafloor, and the consequent discovery of mid-ocean ridges and therefore plate tectonics and continental drift), nuclear weapons, rockets, guidance systems, etc.
After the war our enemy was Russia and her enormous pool of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. The Russians kept us on our toes with things like their early lead in the exploration of Space.
After the Cold War we didn’t have enemies anymore (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we didn’t realize that anyone hated us). The focus changed to economic competition against the Japanese and Europeans. If you want to build cars that are as good as Honda’s you need to hire some pretty clever engineers.
Ever since September 11th we as a nation have been focussed on our Muslim enemies. They don’t invent the jet engine, like the Germans did; they buy Chinese-made copies of the Russian AK-47. They don’t build cars better than Detroit; they use Saudi oil money to buy Toyota pickup trucks. They don’t invent new military tactics (hijacking commercial airline flights was a specialty of Yasser Arafat’s PLO 30+ years ago).
At some level it makes sense to focus on our enemies. After all, our friends aren’t trying to kill us. Furthermore the population trends imply that in the long run our friends are going to fade into demographic insignificance–the groups that are most enthusiastic about killing us have among the world’s highest rates of population growth: nearly 5 percent per year for the Palestinians, 3.27 percent for the Saudis; a friendly country such as Japan grows 0.15 percent per year. Perhaps if we all study these folks carefully enough somehow we can predict when and where the next attack will come.
On the other hand, our military superiority is derived from economic growth. If our economy stagnates because our heads are stuck in the 7th Century AD, so will our military power. By contrast, if we had sufficient economic growth and technological innovation we could, for example, develop and deploy the army of robotic infantry of which a physicist friend dreams. His robots would be shaped like centaurs with the body and four legs of a horse and a human-like head and arms. The robot would have a Gatling gun in its chest. Iraqis would presumably find something to do with their time other than looting if an infantry robot were standing in front of every building in Baghdad.
Putting military conflict aside, a focus on extracting oil from Arab countries takes resources away from the purely technical challenges of producing clean and renewable energy. With sufficiently improved engineering we could run our society on wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power. (If we really wanted to have a go at a tough engineering problem we could try making nuclear power work.) I.e., the only reason that our politicians have to spend so much time appeasing Muslim dictators is that our technology is insufficiently advanced. The point of this blog entry is that there is some circularity here. Our focus on the Muslim world, the most technologically backward portion of the globe, slows down technological development in the West and in Asia, thus forcing the modern societies to continue focusing on the Muslim world…
A new pet theory: it is human nature that we can only “Give 110 percent” and the reference is the amount of achievement being put forth by our perceived enemies or competitors. Until we shift our focus away from troubles in the Islamic world the U.S. economy will be stuck in the mud.
[Note that this blog entry does not presuppose that there is anything inherently superior in the Western way of life or Modernity itself. It is quite possible that an illiterate Afghani with 10 kids is happier than a divorced childless MIT Aero/Astro PhD.]
Is our current situation really a result of events of the last 2 years, or is it the culmination of a longer trend? The end of the cold war caused military spending reductions, and likely a drop in overall funding for and national emphasis on science and engineering. Maybe the decline of primary and secondary education is finally catching up with us. Maybe we’ve just become complacent and risk-averse. It does seem like something’s going on.
Isn’t the shortage of people studying Islamic culture and history (or Middle Eastern languages) even worse than the shortage of engineers?
I see a far greater decrease in the amount of people studying humanities and history in general than I do in a fall off in the amount of engineers and architects. At Drexel there’s a total of 30 Hum majors (granted we hare a tech school but still) and over 800 (roughly) engineers of various types in the freshmen class. Seems like the trends going in the opposite direction. Maybe its not the lack of engineers coming out of schools but the lack of their innovation.
MAYBE it is just a lack of consolidation. Things have shifted to an intermediate level, also technology-wise. It is a question of getting lost vs. pulling (abundant) ressources together. It is easy to forget that in the end the only thing that matters is the real RESULT. In many areas society, science community, or for that matter the economy might be fiddling around with intermediate issues (like IT, education). These are only – albeit powerful – tools for the final purposes, not the main thing, I believe.
Could a culture that thrives on competition indirectly (subconsciously?) seek out a monolith threat to facilitate its own growth? American culture explicitly and implicitly relies on competition on many levels.
While the number of students in these fields in traditional venues may have peaked, the number of people actively-engaged in performing tasks previously assigned to “professionals” may have actually increased. In particular w.r.t. computer-based technologies, many tasks and studies that would have previously been the exclusive domain of EE and mathematics specialists are now being performed by students enrolled in art, journalism, and other programs.
A second factor may be the resurgence of the cult of the auto-didact, today known as a hacker. At my office we have a rough mix of PhD’s, MS’s, and supposedly “uneducated” hackers. The hackers often have senior engineering roles, and they’re darned good at it.
Don’t be so quick to draw causal lines between the current decline of engineering students and the Doom of Innovation!
Perhaps you might not want to unleash your superstud horse with the face of a hero and the gatling gun peering out of his belly button just yet.
A couple of weeks ago the food service workers at the UN all walked of their jobs leaving the doors wide open.
Diplomats looted restaurants, cafeterias, bars. They carted off roasts, turkeys, cases of wine; they picked the place clean. Not all looters in Iraq are Iraqis, some are soldiers, reporters, adventurers. It seems the applicable rule when lawlessness takes over, that God takes care of those who take care of themselves.
I agree with Kevin. Case in point: Thomas Edison,an elementary school dropout. Regarding your theory about human achievement being relative to our antagonists’ achievements is a kind of “negative ambition”. There’s a beautiful poem by James Fenton titled “Children in Exile” about a family of Cambodian refugee children, orphans of the war who are propelled to intellectual achievement not because they know what they want but because they know what they don’t want(war,nightmares,Pol Pot’s horror).Was Edison propelled by poverty at first,then competition?The national economic slump is something else.Which investors are going to finance technological innovation when there’s WorldCom/Enron type scams sucking pension funds dry?The U.S. economy’s enemy isn’t the Islamic world,it’s homegrown American greed.
“Why don’t Americans want to study engineering and science?”
Go ask your MIT students about how many have job offers.
Go ask your former employees about how many have job offers.
Go ask your former business contacts about how many have outsourced their operations to 25 cent an hour Indian labor.
Anyone in the US studying science or engineering today is insane. The only reason to enter college is as a prerequisite for law or business school.
Excellent ! JM . The only thing I would disagree with is your very last sentence : Same applies .
the reason why we have to meddle in the middle east is because we have to burn up all the oil leaving none for the arabs.
even if we had an advanced energy source, we dont want to leave the oil to them. we built nuclear weapons in the forties with an oil economy.
theres a more general point here. we have to keep our enemies in the seventh century because if they even get to 1940 (ages ago in technological terms) we’re fucked…
During the Cold War, we were fed a line of bogus B.S. that our country was so far advanced from the Soviet Union, they could never beat us. Then the Cold War ended and there were different truths to be told.
The fact was that the Russians were very innovative and far more competitive than we ever dreamed of. They invented planes that could fire missiles to the rear of the plane, helmets that allowed pilots to zero in on a target with their eyes and hit it… Our government lied to us if they knew this, or they were very naive if they didn’t. (The Soviet Union’s downfall came from a lack of money, not innovation.)
We can go over to Afghanistan or Iraq, and beat the stuffings out of them — but can we take on North Korea? Could we really take on China? Could we really take on any country with advanced technology? I dunno…
I used to believe everything that our government said. Now I take most of it with a grain of salt. As much as we like to say other countries are spreading propaganda, our own government does the same thing.
Until we stop hearing so much about our “superiority” in so many fields, we’ll continue to have a lack of innovation. Everybody is so cost-conscious these days, it doesn’t make sense to risk the money to come out with something better. And, our present government doesn’t seem willing to invest in technological ideas, but would rather plug along with the same old things.
Halliburton wins government contracts without even having to bid on them. Why would any company go out of it’s way to come up with something better than Halliburton has — if they know they aren’t going to be given a chance to bid on government contracts anyway?
Is there some reason we can’t import immigrant Indian engineers to cover a shortfall in engineers? We did so in the late 90s and I can’t see that it hurt America’s economic growth. I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that America’s openness to immigration is one of the key things that allowed it to grow faster than Japan or Europe during the 1990s.