Insourcing The Science Gap

American colleges and universities can still claim that they are producing more scientists every year but they can juice those numbers by the manner in which they label various academic disciplines as scientific.

“The good news for economists is that we are counted as scientists,” economist Richard B. Freeman said recently at the American Enterprise Institute. “The bad news for economists is, so are sociologists.”

“The [European Union] EU is producing more Ph.D.s than the United States.” The number of science and engineering graduates did go up in the U. S. from 1975 to 1999, according to information presented by Steven J. Davis, a professor at the University of Chicago.

Nonetheless, most international trends show the U. S. lagging behind other nations, notes Dr. Freeman, an economist at Harvard’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Moreover, Dr. Freeman notes that even in the U. S., a growing number of science and engineering majors are foreign-born, essentially leaving the United States faring poorly in its own national statistics.

“I spoke to someone in the State Department,” Dr. Freeman remembered. “I said, ‘Ninety percent of Chinese people are still here seven years after they arrived.’”

“They said, ‘We don’t trust statistics, we trust people.’” Dr. Freeman himself sees such immigration flows as potentially beneficial, pointing out that foreign-born science and engineering graduates cushion the effects of sometime shortages of native-born scientists and engineers in the United States.

As for China itself, Dr. Freeman and other panelists agreed that the communist government on the mainland massively overestimated the number of scientists and engineers that its colleges and universities produce. The actual number of engineering graduates in that country is closer to 462,798 than the 846,690 that the People’s Republic of China estimates.

Still, according to Dr. Freeman, “Because of a weakened comparative advantage in high tech, the U. S. share of science and engineering graduates is falling and must continue to fall.” And that’s not the end of the downbeat news: “The U. S. share of scientific papers is down from 45 to 30 percent,” Dr. Freeman reports.

U. S. Share of College Students

1970 30 %

2000 14 %

U. S. Share of Science and Engineering Ph.D.s

1970 40 %

2000 15 %

Source: Richard B. Freeman, National Bureau of Economic Research

“Within the U. S., moreover, international students have come to earn an increasing proportion of S & E Ph.Ds,” Dr. Freeman wrote in a paper for the NBER. “In 1966, US-born males accounted for 71 % of science and engineering Ph.D.s awarded; 6 % were awarded to U. S.-born females; and 23 % were awarded to the foreign-born.”

“In 2000, 36 % of S & E Ph.D.s went to U. S.-born males, 25 % to U. S.-born females and 39 % to the foreign-born.” Dr. Freeman dismissed the notion that the U. S. was falling behind in producing math and science majors because of a lack of rigor in those fields of study in American public schools. His dismissal of this conclusion was the more striking because education statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which he lists in the bibliography of the paper he presented at AEI, show that very trend.

But Dr. Freeman and other panelists at the AEI event cautioned that despair is probably not the most appropriate response to the United States’ apparent skid in the international scientific community. Fears of Japanese competition abounded in 1936, Dr. David E. Weinstein, a colleague of Dr. Freeman, noted.

According to William P. Lockwood, these fears manifested themselves in reactions ranging from vague worriment to calls for U. S. government aid.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.