A workforce for today and tomorrow
posted 1-15-2009 3:03 a.m.

 
President Obama is saying all the right things about rebuilding not just the physical infrastructure of the nation, but also the workforce infrastructure, in that he thinks there's plenty of opportunity to create new jobs by encouraging the proliferation of newer, greener industries. He's right, as far as that goes — but who's going to be the innovators of those industries if not scientists and engineers, those folks we need but don't have enough of? Not only do we not respect those people we call geeks, we don't graduate enough of them for this future workforce.

Mr. Obama's got to do a lot of fast talking and faster planning to solve this situation before he can convince Congress — because Congress is way behind on this issue. And the Republicans don't even want to discuss it, because of what the funding consequences have to be in order to bring about the goal of more scientists and engineers. Better science and math education in grade and high schools is barely a start: it's college programs that really make the difference and will produce results sooner.

China now graduates five or six times as many scientists, engineers and mathematicians as we do. This is a national security issue for us, not just an economic problem. Unless our universities can keep up by graduating more citizen students who stay here, they too will begin to wither and lose their edge, just like Detroit has — and that edge is not so easy to regain in academia: once you've begun to lose funding, you start to lose faculty (they go elsewhere, even abroad) and then standing. That faculty is difficult to replace, and their replacement (if you can accomplish that at all) takes time. More time than we can spare, so we'd better not have a faculty brain drain here.

So, here's the dilemma, summed up in two headlines:

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

Harvard's Endowment Takes an $8 Billion Hit, Loses 22% Of Its Value

If Harvard's getting hit, you know every other college is having an even harder time, state universities included. Is it time to return to full government scholarships for science, math, IT, and engineering degrees for those who can keep up their grades? You bet. Some assistance for those who go to tech schools or community colleges, but full tilt for all those who keep up their grades in the critical areas of study at four-year colleges and universities. We need a lot more than just a handful of National Merit scholars, and we need those students to study something more than English lit, computer game design, or psychology.

Let me add here that when I talk about graduating more scientists and engineers, I'm including in this group more mathematicians and more information technology/computer science grads. And by the latter, I mean non-entertainment IT: the video game designers and CGI techs can pay for their own education. They'll certainly make enough money in the future to repay their loans.

That probably also means a big funding program for teaching science and math properly in high school and middle schools, without which we won't have enough qualified students to earn those new college scholarships. Yes, this means teaching with materials that mention Darwin, evolution, and the Big Bang — it's time for new federal mandates on classroom books for science and math to override local school boards: along with the money, school districts will have to take books that meet the federal standards.

The people who usually evaluate books on local school boards simply aren't competent to choose books suitable for providing kids with an education that qualifies them for college. The late physicist Richard Feynman was once on a textbook committee, and he was appalled by the parochialism and incompetence he found. And what he found isn't an exception.

To get people who are competent to choose the right grade school and high school science and math textbooks, you need a national panel of qualified academics chosen by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering with a few award-winning high school science and math teachers thrown in for good measure. And NO, there IS no good reason why kids in Kansas or Louisiana should have significantly different science and math textbooks than those in New York, Chicago or Seattle. That's crap promulgated by religious nutcases and states' rights fanatics. And local parents should have no more direct say about which textbooks their kids use than they do about whether or not they pay their taxes.

Our children, no matter where they live, should all be studying the same material and be at the same level nationally, just as is the case in Japan, or Germany, or China, or Australia. So let the NAS- and NAE-chosen committee come up with a list of acceptable books for each grade, from which individual school systems can choose. At least that way, they'll be choosing appropriate books no matter which ones they pick from the list.

Private scholarship programs aren't enough to produce the number of scientists, IT people, mathematicians and engineers we need, and neither are loan programs. We don't want to burden these kids with loans as big as those for medical schools now — we want them in the job market, creating wealth and saving money. Shouldn't we be talking about a full-scholarship program sponsored by DARPA, NAS or NAE, the Institute of Medicine, the National Research Council, perhaps even NASA or NOAA, even if those graduates never end up in government jobs? Ideally, we want most of those graduates to go into private business after college and innovate, innovate, innovate — including figure out how to manufacture those things we invent for less than anyone else can make them, without NOT paying a living wage. Who studies factory design and retooling if not engineers?

And if we cover everyone with a national health insurance program, the medical infrastructure will immediately need more nurses and primary care doctors. We already have plenty of specialists of most kinds; the only kind we need more of are in Ob-Gyn, pediatrics, geriatrics, rheumatology, and infectious disease. We'll also need more epidemiologists to study what works in medicine, and more molecular biologists and others to conduct medical research. We won't get those if we keep dumping huge medical school and graduate school expenses on students — we'll only get more surplus specialists, because they're the only ones who can charge enough to repay those outrageous loans.

We need more of anything related to R&D — and we can't rely on the private sector to produce that, because Wall Street punishes firms that invest heavily in research and development. R&D ties up money that stock analysts, the nitwits, think would be better spent paying quarterly dividends; they're wrong about that, insofar as the economy is concerned, just like they've been wrong about so much lately. So: we have to start considering our colleges and universities, including our nursing and medical schools, as part of the national economic defense infrastructure and begin investing more heavily in them accordingly.

It's in our short-term and long-term interest to do so, to ensure our economic security and prosperity now and in the future. There's far more return on investing in this manner than on spending money for any fighter jets, subs, or battleships you can name. And yes, of course we need to rebuild the physical infrastructure as well — but without those scientists and engineers, who's going to figure out a better way of repairing that physical infrastructure, so that it breaks down less often and costs less to maintain? Foreign engineers, perhaps?? And what's that going to do to our economy and already lopsided trade balance??? Not to mention our international standing in the socio-political-economic arena.

We should also triple or quadruple the budget for the National Science Foundation, because what it gets now is a drop in the bucket compared to that bloated defense budget. We need the NSF to fund more proposals and more kinds of research. The NSF also needs to begin soliciting some kinds of research proposals, issuing RFPs; after all, who else sees the kind of great work that nobody follows up on simply because there isn't enough research money? The reasoning for this budget expansion is described in detail in Kim Stanley Robinson's fascinating environmental trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days And Counting, so I won't elaborate on it here (you should read those books anyway: not just highly entertaining, but very thought provoking as well). Suffice it to say that NSF seed money jump-starts lots of useful directions in basic research, and that's budget money that's always well spent. We just need to spread more of it around, and fast.

Very little of this funding for education and R&D will help most currently unemployed adults, however, unless they can spare the time and money to return to school under those scholarships in the key disciplines — because either they have enough in the bank to live on while in school, or else their spouses will be earning the money meanwhile and paying the bills. That's not possible for many of them. And if those unemployed adults are over 40 and have never been to college, this REALLY won't be the program that addresses any of their problems. That particular set of solutions will have to come from Bill Richardson's department and Obama's council of economic advisers.

However, Tom Friedman at the New York Times has a good idea: waive income taxes for teachers. Teachers make little enough money as it is, and we need more good ones. I'll let Friedman make the rest of that argument, but lifting the tax burden on teachers would certainly incentivize more mid-career unemployed to think about teaching what they know; and that couldn't hurt.

So why are we still talking about bailing out financial services firms and Detroit, when there's nothing either of those industries will do to reform themselves sufficiently to address the unemployed workers' problems, create new jobs, and thereby restart the economy? And perhaps there's nothing they can do, other than possibly forestall more layoffs for a while. So why favor them at the expense of the kinds of workers we know we need more of, now and in the future?

Besides, there's the fairness issue. Those financial services idiots helped to cause part of this recession (that $10 trillion added to the national debt by the Shrub administration sure explains much of the rest). They should be left on the limb they nearly sawed off, and we should help others instead. I don't really care about most of those unemployed in financial services, because so many of them made out like bandits that they really ought to have saved some of that cash (and if they didn't, it's their own damned fault). Wall Street can go hang.

But aside from the incompetent executives and planners, most of those who work for Detroit are Main Street folks, (formerly) middle and working class. Their kids aren't going to have the same kinds of jobs their folks did — and we need those young people to become more than factory or service or retail workers now. Their unemployed parents, that's a harder issue, one that requires faster results than a brand-new college education can produce.

But one thing is certain: superpowers that become service economies don't stay superpowers for very long. We need to get back to the things we do best, and the brightest of those is innovation. Can't do that without scientists, IT and engineers.

So what are we waiting for, senators and congressmen? Get busy!! This agenda is a no-brainer — so it should be right up your alley.