Yesterday night I attended a reception for the international scholars to UCSB. This was the first time that such a celebration took place in Santa Barbara, thanks to an anonymous donor. It was a lively event, and various important people from the UCSB campus showed up. I won’t bore you with the details.
Amongst the interesting facts that I collected yesterday, was that most international students in the US come to study in the science and technology fields, while very few people from the US go out to study and when they do, the statistic is mostly on humanities. I also found out that there are about 640000 students from abroad in US Universities, and that US Universities graduate about 30000 PhD’s annually.
Not surprisingly, current cuts in US University funding (especially state Universities) will hurt the efforts to get the best (graduate) students to the US, with the consequent deterioration of the pool of people with talent contributing to the US economy. An interesting article regarding this issue can be found here.
If you couple all of this progressive lack of investment by the states into the education system, the future starts looking pretty bad, not just for education, but for the US economy.
This year I am working on a University committee in charge of international education. So I have to learn quite a bit about this stuff.
Simple observation: if you lose loose the people from abroad (who are extremely good students), and you lose loose the local people (because they can not afford to go to school any longer), where is the human capital investment in the future development of technology going to come from?
Remember, modern economies depend on having the best and most innovative modern technology in order to compete. And, new ideas for technology come from people who know what the current technologies are, what they can do and how to make them. Ideas are not born from thin air.
Dear David, it surely sounds sensible that if the Academia won’t attract the people from abroad and the good ones from the U.S., it will suffer because of that.
I am less certain about your second statement – namely that the rest of the U.S. economy will suffer for the same reason. Don’t you think that the talented people who are missing in science will go elsewhere, e.g. to the commercial sector, and make this sector stronger rather than weaker?
Of course, another question would be whether the commercial sector can use all this human capital more efficiently and less efficiently than the Academia. I would bet that the answer is “more efficiently”. Another question is whether “innovation” will be how these people will be used, and how they should be used. Well, they probably should.
Concerning the U.S.-non-U.S. brain flows in general, it’s conceivable that the U.S. may have begun to lose its dominant position, already a few years ago. It’s very hard to predict how far this dynamics may go.
Finally, the Americans go to the world to study the humanities because the world has many diverse cultures and human viewpoints – they’re the original regions where the culture(s) began – while the U.S. is a large unified cultural melting pot where the culture(s) ended.
On the other hand, the U.S. has been – and maybe still is – the center of the world’s scientific and technological progress.
Best wishes
Lubos
Lubos:
I’m not talking only about physics here. It is about producing engineers who can make new materials and design new microchips. It affects all science and technology fields, not just science. And it affects the companies who depend on a pool of trained individuals to develop their products.
Without the engineers, where are the new products going to come from? Abroad.
I’m not talking factory jobs here. The commercial sector does not provide the service of training in research and producing new ideas from being exposed to a large number of `courses’ and ‘experimental techniques’.
Patents account for a large part of the revenue stream of modern technology companies (and you can forward that revenue stream to the countries where the companies are based and pay taxes on). So yes, it affects the economy of the country as a whole.
For US to keep its dominant position in the world the key is to keep the lead on cutting edge technologies. Of course if the economy doesn’t go well everything deteriorates. The balance is delicate and in this rapidly changing world with a globalized economy sometimes changes take the form of an avalanche. After the last crisis people more and more are saying that US is losing its political and economical dominance and new powers are emerging.
But I guess America is still the wonder land and the American dream works as a magnet for all kind of talented people around the world including scientists and engineers.
Arghhh! Before you teach Luboš bad habits, change “loose” to “lose”.
Done! I didn’t realize they were two separate words. Both appear in the dictionary, and I didn’t catch it.
One element of the solution to the problem is to start outreach to American students while they are still in elementary school. One of the great travesties in our culture has been the recent focus on all the the “bad” aspects of technology at the expense of losing opportunities to take advantage of all the “good” aspects. Media in this country has reinforced the paradigm that technology is something that should be banned from the classroom, and from most public endeavors.
Higher level academia needs to get over its fear that using online education will doom the brick and mortar establishment. It behooves them to embrace the technology, and begin developing curriculum that takes advanced math and physics concepts and makes it accessible at the 3rd grade level.
A good place to start is Fourier transforms (e.g. the back bone of our modern society). The basic concept, that complex curves can be represented by infinite series of sines and cosines, is sufficiently simple, that it should be taught at the 3rd grades level. I have a translation of a Japanese book called “Who is Fourier?” that does exactly that, and in fact was developed for the purpose of explaining theory at a elementary education level.
I do find it ironic that educators scratch their head and ponder why education is failing in this country. Have they become so narcissistic that they can only think of their own institutional survival and not remain focused on what they are supposed to be doing…educating?
p.s.
another good reason to look at the book is that the english version was checked for technical errors by Yoichiro Nambu…the 2008 Nobel prize recipient.