Scoring Progress 10 Years Later – Rising Above the Gathering Storm

Shortly after the turn of the 21^st century, leaders from science, industry, and academia came together and acknowledged a growing concern that growth, prosperity, and innovation in the United States were in jeopardy due to insufficient investment in the skilled workforce required in the 21^st century workplace. At the request of Congress, the National Academies’ Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) established the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century: An Agenda for American Science and Technology. The committee members included presidents of major universities, Nobel laureates, CEOs of Fortune 100 corporations, and former presidential appointees. They were asked to investigate the following questions:

• What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century?
• What implementation strategy, with several concrete steps, could be used to implement each of those actions?

With an overarching goal to “…help US achieve prosperity in 21^st century...” the committee’s findings and recommendations were published in 2007 (Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future)[1].

The committee identified two key challenges that are tightly coupled to scientific and engineering prowess: 1) creating high-quality jobs for Americans; and 2) responding to the nation’s need for clean, affordable, and reliable energy. To address those challenges, the committee structured its ideas according to four basic recommendations that focus on the human, financial, and knowledge capital necessary for US prosperity.  Today, I’m going to select two of the tangible recommendations and see how we’re progressing more than a decade later.

First – under the category: 10,000 teachers, 10 million minds, and K12 science and mathematics education, the recommendation was to increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 science and mathematics education. One of the actions requested was to enlarge the pipeline of students who are prepared to enter college and graduate with a degree in science, engineering, or mathematics by increasing the number of students who pass AP and IB science and mathematics courses. The action goes on to imply that the goal should be for 1.5 million students to take the exam with those passing it raised to more than 700,000. To promote striving to meet these achievements would include financial incentives like grants and mini-scholarships.  Interestingly, if you compare 2007 to 2017, and if you combine all of the science and math tests, numbers raise from ~850k taking the test and ~415k passing to ~2.05M taking the test with 1.25M passing. We’ve more than doubled the number of tests taken (perhaps in part due to the number of possible subjects also increasing) and also have improved our percentage passing the exam from just under 50% to just over 60%. On the surface, it looks like we’ve achieved our marks for this initiative so we’ll give ourselves a B+ grade (would be an A if there was a way to normalize for added tests and the likelihood of those taking more than one test increasing).

As our second example, take a look at the section titled Best and Brightest in Science and Engineering Education. Recommendation C focuses on improving talent development: 

Make the United States the most attractive setting in which to study and perform research so that we can develop, recruit, and retain the best and brightest students, scientists, and engineers from within the United States and throughout the world. 

One of the action is to: 

Increase the number and proportion of US citizens who earn bachelor’s degrees in the physical sciences, the life sciences, engineering, and mathematics by providing 25,000 new 4-year competitive undergraduate scholarships each year to US citizens attending US institutions. 

This one is a little harder to score out due to available data. If you look at trends in degree attainment from 2006 – 2016 you’ll see approximately a 25% increase in bachelor’s degrees overall (from ~1.5M to 1.9M). This is where the comparison gets a bit tricky. Without having clean data that accounts for total degree attainment in the sciences versus all others, we need to apply some basic gender breakdowns in order to break apart and then put back together the data. In the mid-2000s, 38% of male degrees were in the sciences and 28% of females obtained bachelor’s degrees in these fields. Those frequencies rose slightly a decade later to 40% and 29% respectively[2]. If you apply those to our numerical degree breakdowns you end up with approximately 483k and 637k science bachelor’s degrees conferred in mid-2000s and mid-2010s respectively. So if you take a look at the goal, we did increase the overall number and we did increase the proportion (albeit slightly) of graduates in the sciences. I think we’d need to grade ourselves in the low B range here due to the fact that our proportion only moved up slightly. And there’s little/no data (at least that I can uncover) that links any increase in scholarship monies with enhanced study in the sciences.

So when I look at these trends at least on the surface, I’m encouraged that we’re moving in the right direction. Where I’m concerned is the glacial pace at which we’re addressing these issues. We still have a major issue with degree attainment in institutionally defined time; we have challenges with persistence in the hard sciences; and our workplace needs are evolving at breakneck speed. Personally I don’t think the solution can come from our post-secondary system as we currently know it. But rather from some yet to be proposed set of solution(s) that will disrupt education in ways that we can’t currently fathom. Perhaps Mr. Bezos/Gates/Buffet will take another swing at higher education after they’re done with the US healthcare system. Only time will tell.