It's the engineers, stupid!

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce doesn't mince words. They hit the reader right between the eyes with this statement: ...the United States will have to be number one or two in technology leadership in every industry in which it expects to be a major competitor if we expect to maintain our current wage levels and grow our economy enough to maintain the standard of living of the society as a whole."

The commission continues: "This is not an argument about engineers. Engineers in this context are just a stand-in for the large body of people we will need with very high skills in mathematics, science, and technology, of whom our engineers are only a small part....if we want to continue to maintain our current standard of living, we simply must have a large and growing supply of world-class scientists, mathematicians, and engineers." [Emphasis mine.]

Then comes the most important sentence in their entire report: "...the point here is that while people who specialize in these disciplines alone are hardly sufficient, without them, nothing else will matter." [Emphasis mine.]

The Business Roundtable reported in  2005 that "The number of engineering degrees awarded in the United States is down 20% from the peak year of 1985. More than 50% of all engineering doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. engineering colleges are to foreign nationals."

Most of these foreign nationals used to stay in the USA, putting their degrees to work for our economy. Now, many return to their home nations. This has led Pulitzer-prize winning author Thomas Friedman to remark that the smartest thing our nation could do is to staple a green card to every advanced degree awarded to a foreigner in technical fields by a U.S. college.

Even as we produce a shrinking pool of technical talent, some of this talent is lost to other fields. 25% of MIT's graduates take jobs in the financial industry where they put their skills to work creating mathematical models for the esoteric financial products sold by the Wall Street casinos.

China? 33% of undergraduates in China are studying engineering.

Feel like doing something patriotic? Don't waste your time decorating your car with flags or magnetic ribbons, or looking for a flag pin to wear in your lapel.

If you really want to be patriotic, get a kid interested in math, or science, or engineering. The standard of living of our children and grandchildren hangs in the balance.