Recent Alarms

In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind ... our generation's Sputnik moment is back.

—President Barack Obama, 2010, "Remarks by the President on the Economy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina," December 6, 2010

Three highly influential reports, all released within a five-month period in 2005 and all guided by prominent corporate leaders, have dominated the past years of discussions about whether the United States is falling behind in terms of its science and engineering workforce. These three followed different styles but had much in common, and for good reason, as we shall see.

The first report, entitled Innovate America, was published in May 2005 as a product of the "National Innovation Initiative" of the Council on Competitiveness; it addressed a very broad range of issues it considered central to innovation. The second and third of the reports published in 2005 focused heavily upon the issues surrounding the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce. Tapping America's Potential (TAP) was produced and published in July 2005 by the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of large U.S.-headquartered corporations. The last of this report trio, released in October 2005, was produced by an ad hoc committee appointed by the National Research Council and bore the evocative title Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (Gathering Storm).

Both the TAP and Gathering Storm reports recounted indicators of decline in both the quantity and quality of U.S. students graduating from the nation's K-12 primary and secondary education systems, particularly their skills in science and mathematics. Both made the case that the result is inadequate numbers of scientists and engineers—whether current or projected—that pose profound threats to the future of U.S. economic prosperity and security.

The views of leaders of corporations, business associations, and research universities that energized all three of these 2005 reports were echoed and amplified by prominent journalists and editorial writers; by leaders of K-12 education; by prominent figures in higher education and research; by numerous state governors; and by national politicians of both parties. Indeed, it is fair to say this perspective has been and continues to be the conventional and dominant view among elite U.S. opinion leaders.

Yet, as we shall see, it is also a perspective that has been but little scrutinized in an objective way, and rarely tested against empirical evidence. It is the goal—perhaps the overly ambitious goal—of this book to describe what is known, what is unknown, and even what is intrinsically unknowable about this critical set of issues.

Innovate America

This report, produced by a project called the National Innovation Initiative organized by the Council on Competitiveness, was led by a nineteen-member "Principals Committee." This committee was comprised of ten CEOs of major corporations and nine presidents of leading research universities and institutions, and was co-chaired by Samuel J. Palmisano, CEO of IBM Corporation and G. Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Institute of Technology (see table 1.1).

A related advisory committee was co-chaired by Norman R. Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation and William R. Brody, president of Johns Hopkins University. The report lists numerous working groups in addition to these leadership committees, and hundreds attended the "National Innovation Initiative Summit" in December 2004 to discuss the Initiative's recommendations.

The scope of the Innovate America report was far broader than the two reports that followed and are discussed later, as it addressed the entire "innovation ecosystem" of the U.S. economy. Its recommendations included improvements in U.S. "infrastructure," including support for innovative manufacturing, national prizes for innovation, improvements to the U.S. patent system, and expansion of integrated health data systems. In addition there were recommendations under the heading "investment" that included expanded federal support for the physical sciences and engineering, a permanent and restructured research and development (R&D) tax credit for corporations, increased tax incentives favoring early-stage risk capital provided by angel networks and seed capital funds, and reforms in the U.S. tort system. Under its third main heading of "talent," Innovate America noted that K-12 education was not its primary focus, but did make recommendations for U.S. higher education including federal funding for at least 5,000 new portable graduate fellowships in science and engineering, tax deductions for private sector scholarships for U.S. undergraduates in science and engineering, expansion of Professional Science Master's programs at U.S. universities, and measures to attract international science and engineering students and provide them with work permits. As we shall see, these latter recommendations had much in common with those embraced by the two later reports issued by other organizations that same year.

Tapping America's Potential (TAP)

The TAP report, a declarative pamphlet only nineteen pages long, was produced in July 2005 by a coalition of industry associations led by the Business Roundtable, "an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than over $6 trillion in annual revenues and more than 14 million employees." Its signatories included fourteen other politically influential business organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The report was addressed "To Leaders Who Care about America's Future." It began with an expression of "deep concern" about the ability of the United States to sustain its leadership in science and technology and thereby to maintain its economic competitiveness. In response to such concerns, it called for a rapid doubling of the number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates earning bachelor's degrees during the decade from 2005 to 2015.

Its perspective and recommendations were succinctly summarized in its first few paragraphs:

Fifteen of our country's most prominent business organizations have joined together to express our deep concern about the United States' ability to sustain its scientific and technological superiority through this decade and beyond. To...