Washington
A National Academies committee on Wednesday gave Congress a list of the 20 most urgently needed changes in federal support for research and education to help ensure that the United States economy and defense remain strong. The recommendations -- including 25,000 new, federally financed college scholarships in mathematics and science and a doubling of federal funds for basic research in the physical sciences -- would carry a hefty price tag of $10-billion.
That level of spending will be extraordinarily tough to sell at a time when the federal budget deficit is amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars because of hurricane relief, the war in Iraq, and other reasons. The panel ignored that obstacle in reporting its recommendations, which had been requested by two U.S. senators, Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, and Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat.
The report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” was quickly assembled this past summer by a 20-member committee with an all-star lineup of prominent scientists and administrators from academe and industry.
Asked at a news conference here about the overall price tag, Norman R. Augustine, chairman of the panel and a retired chairman of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, said, “We can’t afford not to” spend the money. “It’s not a cost,” he said. “It’s really an investment” that will generate jobs and tax revenue linked to high-tech businesses.
“Obviously it’s a large sum of money, but not a large sum of money compared with other expenditures of our government,” he continued. “This is one of the very most important problems that our nation faces, albeit a gradually evolving problem.”
The report’s principal recommendations are not new or focused directly on higher education. It advocates improving public schools and using research to find new sources of energy to make America less dependent on imported oil. However, the wish list repeats several major changes that some higher-education advocates have requested for years.
Among those, the report says, the federal government should provide college scholarships of $20,000 a year to U.S. citizens to pursue undergraduate degrees from American institutions in science, engineering, or math. The government should also support 5,000 new graduate fellowships, at the same annual amount, in “areas of national need,” it says
Spending on the physical sciences should be doubled through 10-percent annual increases over seven years, the report says. It also includes suggestions for revising visa policies to encourage foreign students to study and remain in the United States. And the panel recommended that the Department of Energy create an organization like Darpa, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, to finance especially novel research aimed at solving the nation’s energy-supply problems.
The report echoes many observers’ worries about the growing globalization of the world’s economy. Companies are increasingly moving jobs of all kinds from the United States to developing nations, like China, where wages are lower. Meanwhile, the United States is lagging behind other countries in the production of Ph.D.'s in science. Increasing the number of scientific workers will be vital to creating high-tech industries that are likely to generate new, well-paying jobs here, the report argues.
However, other recent calls from other experts to increase the scientific work force have drawn controversy. Forecasting future employment needs is notoriously difficult, and previous projections of an undersupply turned out to be wrong only after they had created a glut of newly minted scientists with few job prospects (The Chronicle, July 9, 2004).
At the news briefing, Mr. Augustine acknowledged those difficulties but said, “In this world of technology that we are increasingly entering, there will be additional jobs for scientists and engineers, and these jobs can be here or abroad. If we don’t produce more engineers, they will clearly be abroad.”
Another member of the panel, P. Roy Vagelos, a retired chairman of Merck & Company, spoke in similar terms of the report’s recommended number of college scholarships. “We can’t defend any one number,” he said, “but we know it’s greater than we’re doing today because we’re underproducing other countries.”
After the news conference, the academy’s executive officer, E. William Colglazier, said the committee had based the recommended number on some “back of the envelope” calculations related to the size of other scholarship programs. The precision of the panel’s work was necessarily limited by the deadline of this month set by the senators, he said. The committee’s members had just one meeting in person and conducted other deliberations via e-mail.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
