It's the back to school daze. If you are a parent or perhaps taking classes yourself, you find that your schedules are set and we're well on our way into the 2006-07 academic year. This year I received a rather remarkable parents' note from my 8th grader's science teacher. We've all heard it before but perhaps not as a rallying cry for parents of elementary school-aged children. The message was simply that we need to work harder in the areas of mathematics, science and the engineering fields if we hope to retain our global competitive position and ensure our economic future.
This problem seems to be one that is often sensationalized. Information sources claim that countries including China and India are graduating twelve times more engineers each year than does the U.S. Perhaps the sheer size of the discrepancy in numbers numbs us. Certainly these statistics are worrisome, but given the globalization of the world economy one might argue that even a paltry two times differential might be enough to cause worry. I think we can all envision a future filled with shortages in local technical expertise and a general scientific decline in those countries on the short end of the engineering output.
A few months back, a group at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University questioned the statistics that we have been bombarded with over the past few years. The typically cited numbers are that China graduates 600,000 engineers from institutions of higher education, India graduates 350,000 and only 70,000 come from the U.S. The Duke team determined that in 2004 - using what they call "apples-to-apples" comparisons - the U.S. graduated 222,335 engineers and India 215,000. Getting the numbers from China was not as straightforward. China's closest comparable numbers reported 644,106 graduates but many of the majors included in the classification "engineer" were not ones used in the U.S. or India, for example, auto mechanic.
When the Duke team dug in a bit further and looked at only four-year programs instead of all post-secondary degree programs, it found the numbers from each region changed significantly. In 2004 the U.S. graduated 137,437 engineers vs. 112,000 from India and 351,537 from China. These numbers still include some unconventional engineering categories such as information technology.
What is the value of this information? Common sense tells me that having a critical mass of scientifically inclined and educated engineering, science, mathematics and technology graduates is imperative to developing a technology leadership position. But does it really matter how many engineers are graduated in each region? Some big companies like Proctor & Gamble don't think so. They are reaching beyond their core group of scientists and beyond traditional regional boundaries to form the innovation clusters they need for a project. In addition to the 8,000 scientists and engineers they have on staff, they have taken proactive steps to include the rest of their 100,000 plus global employees in their development programs. In this structure, everyone becomes a part of the innovation system. And the benefits from this approach show themselves in the P&G numbers. Since A.G. Laftley became CEO in 2001 and began implementing these fundamental innovation system changes, the company's stock price has doubled.
That's not to say that we still don't have a lot of work to do as a country to maintain our technology position. The National Center for Educational Statistics has a global initiative that tests the math and science competency of nine- and 13-year-olds in more than 75 countries. In 2003 the U.S. came in 15th, behind nations like Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary. The good news is that our scores were better than in 1995 and 1999. But our position on the world stage hasn't changed much. In 2007 these tests will be given again and my daughter will be one of the participants. It will be interesting to see if we have gained ground in the past three years, or lost it to the rising tide of excellence we find around the world.
