By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer
As Michigan State University attempts to turn high school students on to engineering and small tech, it’s fighting a U.S. trend that has seen fewer scientists and engineers graduating from universities.
Since 1987, despite the growth of the Internet, the number of U.S. students graduating with computer science degrees has dropped from 45,000 a year to 24,000.
According to the National Science Foundation, the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in graduate programs in science and engineering declined from 329,073 in 1994 to 301,404 in 1999.
Roman Czujko, director of the statistical research center at the American Institute of Physics in Washington, D.C., said the number of Americans getting Ph.D.’s in physics is expected to decline through 2005.
The United States ranks just 10th in the world in graduating scientists and engineers, with England ranked number one.
“This should be a wake-up call, not just to Congress but to the entire nation,” Rep. Cal Dooley, D-Calif., was quoted as saying two weeks ago. Dooley was reacting to comments made by the director of Hewlett-Packard’s nanotechnology laboratory, Stan Williams, who told congressional Democrats that no one in his lab under the age of 45 is an American.
Many of the foreign scientists now at U.S. companies are here on temporary-worker visas, which grant them an initial stay of three years, with one three-year extension allowed. As those extensions expire, the scientists and researchers must leave, either taking their skills back home or to other welcoming countries.
According to figures compiled by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 81,262 visas were granted for specialty occupation workers from Oct. 1, 1999 to Feb. 29, 2000.
India had the most, 34,381, (42.6 percent), with China next at 7,987 (9.9 percent) and Canada third, with 3,143 (3.9 percent).
Computer-related specialists, most of them from India, accounted for 42,563 visas (53.5 percent), with those lumped in architecture, engineering and surveying accounting for 10,385 jobs (13.1 percent).
The top employers of incoming foreign nationals during that span were Motorola Inc., 618; Oracle Corp., 455; and Cisco Systems Inc., 398.
Economist Paul Romer also addressed the Democrats two weeks ago, telling them that in this knowledge-driven economy, a shortage of knowledge workers is a real threat to the economy.
Romer had written a white paper for Congress last year, outlining a $2 billion plan that would give universities $10,000 a head for each scientist or engineer they graduate. He also suggested giving $20,000 in annual fellowships to some 17,000 students seeking science or engineering degrees.
A proposed bill based on that white paper has been scaled back to $100 million in incentives, but its future is uncertain.
Meanwhile, competing countries continue to pour money into small tech, particularly nanotechnology. On July 18, for example, Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute announced it would open a Center for Applied Nanotechnology Institutes this January, with funding set at $286 million over the next five years.
In May, China opened its first market-oriented research and development center on nanotechnology in the eastern province of Zhejiang. Since the 1980s, China has opened dozens of state-funded laboratories in a wide range of high tech fields. In addition, in late July the city of Shanghai began operations at a new nanocenter that is expected to eventually take up about 2.5 million square feet.
South Korea has announced a 10-year, $1.3 billion plan for nanotech research and development.
In Europe, the Karslruhe Research Center in Germany and the MESA+ Research Institute, part of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, are focal points for government-funded efforts to make Europe the center of the small tech.
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Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-528-6292.