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TwitThisLosing the Global Edge
William Kunz is a self-described computer geek. A more apt description might be computer genius. When he was just 11, Kunz started writing software programs, and by 14 he had created his own video game. As a high school sophomore in Houston, Texas, he won first prize in a local science fair for a data encryption program he wrote. In his senior year, he took top prize in an international science and engineering fair for designing a program to analyze and sort DNA patterns.Kunz went on to attend Carnegie Mellon, among the nation's highest-ranked universities in computer science. After college he landed a job with Oracle in Silicon Valley, writing software used by companies around the world.
Kunz looked set to become a star in his field. Then he gave it all up.
Today, three years later, Kunz is in his first year at Harvard Business School. He left software engineering partly because his earning potential paled next to friends who were going into law or business. He also worried about job security, especially as more companies move their programming overseas to lower costs. "Every time you're asked to train someone in India, you think, 'Am I training my replacement?'" Kunz says.
Things are turning out very differently for another standout in engineering, Qing-Shan Jia. A student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Jia shines even among his gifted cohorts at a school sometimes called "the MIT of China." He considered applying to Harvard for his PhD, but decided it wasn't worth it.
His university is investing heavily in cutting-edge research facilities, and attracts an impressive roster of international professors. "I can get a world-class education here and study with world-class scholars," Jia says.
These two snapshots illustrate part of a deeply disturbing picture. In the disciplines underpinning our high-tech economy -- math, science and engineering -- America is steadily losing its global edge. The depth and breadth of our problem is clear:
- Several of our key agencies for scientific research and development will face a retirement crisis within the next ten years.
- Less than 6% of our high school seniors plan to pursue engineering degrees, down 36% from a decade ago.
- In 2000, 56% of China's undergraduate degrees were in the hard sciences; in the United States, the figure was 17%.
- China will likely produce six times the number of engineers next year than we will graduate, according to Mike Gibbons of the American Society for Engineering Education. Japan, with half our population, has minted twice as many in recent years.
"Most Americans are unaware of how much science does for this country and what we stand to lose if we can't keep up," says Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate, puts it bluntly: "We can't hope to keep intact our standard of living, our national security, our way of life, if Americans aren't competitive in science. Period."
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