On
October 4, 1957, a steel sphere the size of a beach ball and bristling
with four radio antennae circled the Earth in eight minutes. Dubbed
“Satellite-1,” or “PS-1” (Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1) by its Soviet
fabricators, it was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets
had launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit, where it stayed for
three weeks before its batteries died. Then it continued silently in a
decaying orbit for another two months before burning up in the
atmosphere. Its radio signal pulses were easily detectable by ham radio
operators, as well as by every national security listening post in the
United States and around the world.
The world had a new word—Sputnik—and
the United States a new mission: to close the gap in the race for space
with the Soviet Union. That urgent sense of mission triggered a
revolution in American education. This revolution was spurred not only
by the desire to win the space race, but also to get a generation of
young Americans excited about and educated in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics—what would be
abbreviated as STEM. At stake was victory in the Cold War, and with it
the future of freedom and democracy in the struggle against Communism.
The effects of that post-Sputnik revolution helped to put Americans
on the moon a little more than a decade later. It continued to
reverberate through the computer and dot-com revolutions of the 1980s
and 1990s, as well as in the Strategic Defense Initiative and the
Pentagon’s technological transformation during the same period,
sometimes known as the Second Offset Strategy.
Since then, STEM has been a perennial concern for American education
experts and politicians. Beginning in the 1980s, there have been new and
growing worries that STEM proficiency is declining in America, and with
it the future of America’s economic and scientific leadership.
Multiple official reports have pointed out the problem—including
the most recent one released by the Trump administration this past
December. Yet this perennial hand-wringing and all the spending and
grants by agencies like the National Science Foundation have had little
effect. This failure is reflected not only in a long history of
declining test scores relative to other industrialized countries, but
also in a decreasing proportion of American students willing to devote
themselves to STEM subjects. By 2009, for example, the total number of
students in college had grown by more than 50 percent since 1985. But in
mathematics and statistics, there were only 15,496 graduates in 2009,
not many more than the 15,009 graduates in 1985. More students were
studying the visual and performing arts than were studying computer
science, math, and chemical engineering combined.1
Meanwhile, a new competitor for STEM leadership is looming on the horizon, just as the Soviet Union did in 1950s—namely China. And STEM leadership remains just as vital to our national security—perhaps even more so now than when Sputnik was launched.
Today’s Defense Department and other leading experts all agree that
the future of America’s defense will rely on advanced technologies such
as AI, cyber, quantum, robotics, directed energy and hypersonic weapons,
and even 3-D printing. The Obama Pentagon began pointing out this
reality in 2014, in a series of landmark speeches unveiling what it
dubbed the Third Offset Strategy.2
All of the above technologies will be critical if the United States is
to maintain its military superiority over its rivals, including China.
They will also require new levels of scientific and engineering aptitude
and understanding, not just from their designers but from producers and
users, including the next generation of warfighters.
This is particularly, even acutely, true of quantum computing and
quantum technology. Both rest on an entirely different basis than
classical computing, namely quantum physics rather than mathematics. As
I’ve written in an earlier American Affairs article, quantum’s disruptive possibilities far exceed that of any technology since nuclear weapons.3
Without a trained quantum workforce, and without a strong cadre of
researchers and teachers who are capable of expanding our knowledge of
quantum information science, we will face a shortfall in this critical
twenty-first-century technology. Such a shortfall would materially
affect our ability to win wars in the coming decades.
The same is true in other areas of the struggle for high-tech
supremacy. Where will those trained cadres come from? If current trends
continue, they will increasingly, and inevitably, come from outside the
United States. The long-term trend of having to rely on foreign
nationals to fill America’s STEM gap, which began in the late 1990s and
early 2000s, is now here to stay.
Immigrants accounted for well over 50 percent of the growth in employment in STEM-related fields between 2003 and 2008.4 In addition, foreign students make up the majority of majors and graduate students in many STEM fields in American universities—including students from our leading geopolitical competitor, mainland China.
Overall, the data shows that enrollment of international students in
U.S. science and engineering university programs has been steadily
rising since 2008, while the number of U.S. citizens and permanent
residents enrolled in those programs has steadily declined. We are
witnessing a gradual withering away of American college student
engagement in the very same STEM disciplines that will determine who
dominates, and who is dominated, in the twenty-first century.
The Trump administration’s recently released report “Charting a
Course for Success: America’s Strategy for STEM Education” stated: “Now
more than ever the innovation capacity of the United States—and its prosperity and security—depends
on an effective and inclusive STEM education ecosystem. . . . Simply to
function as an informed consumer and citizen in a world of increasingly
sophisticated technology requires the ability to use digital devices
and STEM skills such as evidence-based reasoning.”5
In fact, the administration’s report understates the case. We now
face a crisis, and one that will not wait for free market forces to
solve.
The Current State of U.S. STEM Education
What is the current state of STEM education in America? One of the
most important benchmarks for measuring STEM proficiency in the United
States and around the world is the Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA). Every three years it measures reading ability, math
and science literacy, and other key skills among fifteen-year-olds in a
large number of developed and developing countries.
The most recent PISA results date from 2015. The United States ranked
thirty-eighth out of seventy-one countries in math and twenty-fourth in
science. Among the thirty-five members of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (the PISA’s principal sponsor), the United
States comes in fifth from the bottom in math and nineteenth in
science.6
Dismal scores like these in the early 2000s were enough to trigger a
National Academies of Sciences report, “Rising Above the Gathering
Storm,” which argued that strengthening science and math education was
essential if the United States was going to remain prosperous in the
twenty-first century. The poor performance was also enough to force
Congress to pass the America competes Act, authorizing funding for a variety of new programs to improve K–12 science and math education.7
Despite the funding and the national hoopla, however, signs of
improvement are hard to find. Another measurement of America’s STEM
status is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) run by
the Department of Education. In 2015, eight years after the America competes
Act, average math scores for fourth- and eighth-graders fell for the
first time since 1990. On a scale of 0 to 500, the average fourth-grade
NAEP math score was 240—the same level as
in 2009. The average eighth-grade score was 282 in 2015, the lowest
since 2007. That year, NAEP revealed that only 38 percent of
fourth-graders, 34 percent of eighth-graders, and 22 percent of
twelfth-graders could be considered proficient or better in science. At
the same time, 24 percent of fourth-graders, 32 percent of
eighth-graders, and 40 percent of twelfth-graders were rated “below
basic” for their grade levels.8
A third measurement is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study or timss,
which has tested international students in grades four and eight every
four years since 1995. Again, in the most recent test from 2015, ten
countries (out of forty-eight total) had higher average fourth-grade
math scores than the United States, while seven countries had higher
average science scores. In the eighth-grade tests, seven out of
thirty-seven countries had statistically higher average math scores than
the United States, and seven had higher science scores. In the
fourth-grade math category, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, England, and
Norway all scored higher—as did China and Russia.9
These mediocre results won’t surprise most Americans. A 2015 Pew
Research Center report found that only 29 percent of Americans rated
their country’s K–12 education in STEM as above average or the best in
the world. Scientists were even more critical. A companion survey of
members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found
that just 16 percent called U.S. K–12 STEM education the best or above
average; 46 percent, by contrast, said K–12 STEM education in the United
States was below average.10
In summing up the state of STEM in America, the Trump
administration’s “Charting a Course for Success” report puts the best
spin it can on the STEM issue. It asserts that “Americans’ basic STEM
skills have modestly improved over the past two decades” but also admits
that we “continue to lag behind many other countries” and that “recent
data from a test commonly taken by college-bound high school students
found that only 20% are ready for courses typically required for a STEM
major.”11
On the other hand, the report said, “in the past 15 years, India and
China have outpaced the United States in the number of science and
engineering (S&E) bachelor’s degrees conferred.” Indeed, “these two
countries have produced almost half of the total degrees, with India at
25% and China at 22% of the global total.” Meanwhile, “American S&E
bachelor’s degrees comprised only 10% of the global total.”12
Which brings us to a double paradox. While Americans perform well
below average in STEM disciplines, their colleges and universities
continue to have some of the best STEM programs in the world. And while
Americans tend to stand aloof from the centers of STEM excellence in our
colleges and universities, foreign students emphatically do not.
Foreign Students and America’s STEM Future
Today, the United States remains the country of choice for the
largest number of international students, hosting about 1.1 million of
the 4.6 million enrolled worldwide in 2017. As of March 2018, roughly
1.2 million F-1 (visa for full-time students at an academic institution)
and M-1 (visa for full-time students at a vocational or other
nonacademic institution) students were enrolled and registered at more
than 8,700 certified schools across the United States.13
In the 2016–17 school year, China was the top origin country for
international students (351,000), representing 33 percent of the total,
followed by India (17 percent); South Korea and Saudi Arabia (5 percent
each) and Canada (3 percent) rounded out the top five. Engineering,
business management, and math and computer science were the top three
fields of study for international students in 2016–17, accounting for
more than half of all international enrollment at U.S. higher education
institutions.
Overall, the data shows that the enrollment of international students
in U.S. science and engineering college and university programs has
been steadily rising since 2008, while the number of U.S. citizens and
permanent residents enrolled in such programs has steadily declined. In
2017, the number of international visa holders increased in computer
sciences and mathematics (by 11 and 5 percent, respectively) but
declined in engineering (5 percent), social sciences (3 percent), and
non-S&E fields (4 percent). At the same time, 48 percent of
international students were in STEM fields and were eligible for
extended 12- to 36-month Optional Practice Training (OPT) visas upon
graduation.14
There is an even larger proportion of international graduate students
than undergraduates enrolled in science and engineering programs. (More
than six in ten international graduate students in the United States in
fall 2017 were enrolled in these fields, compared with about four in
ten international undergraduates.) In 2017, 62 percent of all
international students in graduate programs at U.S. institutions were
enrolled in S&E fields—69 percent of those came from China and India.
In fact, according to the National Foundation for American Policy,
both undergraduate majors and graduate programs at many U.S.
universities could not be maintained without international students.
Foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate
students in electrical engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75
percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent
in mechanical engineering, 59 percent in civil engineering, and 57
percent in chemical engineering. Without international students, the
number of full-time students pursuing graduate degrees in the fields of
computer science, electrical engineering, and other fields would be
shockingly small for an economy as large as America’s.15
Furthermore, students on temporary visas continue to earn high
proportions of U.S. S&E doctorates, as well as large shares of the
master’s degrees in these fields. In 2015, international students earned
more than half of the doctoral degrees awarded in engineering,
economics, computer sciences, mathematics, and statistics; their overall
share of S&E degrees was 34 percent. Once again, Chinese students
composed a large share: 28.8 percent of the S&E doctorates issued to
international students on temporary visas between 1995 and 2015 went to
Chinese nationals.16
When we look at individual colleges and universities, especially
those highly ranked in science and engineering, the numbers look even
more alarming. At Harvard University’s Computer Sciences Department, for
example, more than half (53 percent) of students are foreign students.
At MIT, there are slightly fewer (43 percent) in computer sciences, but
55 percent in electrical engineering.
At Princeton and Yale, the picture of American STEM appears even more
dismal. In Princeton’s computer sciences department, 60 percent of
students are international; the number is 70 percent in electrical
engineering. Yale’s American participation is no more than 19 percent in
computer sciences and 12 percent in electrical engineering. At the
University of Maryland, computer sciences students are 81 percent
foreign nationals; Virginia Tech enrolls 77 percent, and Purdue
University computer sciences 76 percent. The graph below tells the rest
of the story.
![]()
Overall, the proportion of international PhD-level students on
temporary visas to study STEM subjects in the United States has doubled
over the past thirty years. A July 2016 report by the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation argued that if current trends continue,
international students will comprise half of U.S. STEM PhD graduates by
2020.17
How serious a national security threat is this trend? On the one
hand, the presence of large numbers of foreign students studying in the
United States, even Chinese students, should not be a cause for alarm by
itself—nothing argues for a xenophobic
approach to this growing phenomenon. At the same time, many companies in
Silicon Valley will argue that without foreign nationals, they can’t
fill the gaps in their ranks. Nor, obviously, would similar programs at
major universities around the country be able to sustain themselves.
On the other hand, when the Pentagon and other national security
agencies start looking for STEM graduates and STEM-trained engineers who
can pass the necessary security clearances, they will find themselves
facing a severe shortfall of American nationals who can pass muster. In
short, an alarming trend is developing: America’s ability to produce,
sustain, and protect research in key technological and knowledge areas
vital to our defense and national security looks vulnerable because the
talent pool of American citizens working in this area is shrinking. And
while U.S. leadership in STEM is slipping away, other countries,
including China, continue to surge ahead.
China: The Threat at Home and Abroad
On June 19, 2017, NextWeb ran an article entitled “While
U.S. STEM Education Market Declines, China Invests Heavily.” The gist of
the article by Rick Ye was that, although the United States is the
world’ s biggest producer of STEM goods and services, and U.S. edtech
companies were able to generate an estimated $1.3 billion in venture
capital deals in 2016, “the world is questioning the fate of STEM
education in US school systems.” The growing shortfall in U.S. STEM
education and its supporting edtech industry has led major U.S.
companies like Microsoft to search for talent—and support education in—other countries, since the United States can’t meet their needs.
On the other hand, the article pointed out that China’s “STEM learning industry is projected to hit $15 billion by 2020.”18
In addition, the per capita expenditure of Chinese households on
education has tripled over the past decade, rising from 670 yuan in 2000
to 2,381 yuan in 2015. China clearly sees investment in STEM as a
priority for its future as a superpower, and where the government isn’t
doing the investing, average Chinese families are.
Today China is the world leader in number of STEM graduates. The
World Economic Forum reported that China had 4.7 million recent STEM
graduates in 2016, and India had 2.6 million new STEM graduates, while
the United States had only 568,000. China’s president Xi Jinping has
repeatedly declared that his aim is to transform the country into a
“science and technology superpower.” This is an essential part of his
“Made in China 2025” program announced late last year, and China’s
larger agenda of displacing the United States as the world’s dominant
superpower. Fortunately for Xi’s dream, China has the educational tools
to achieve that aim.
Not surprisingly, given its population, the Chinese state-run
education system is the largest in the world. The Compulsory Education
Law of China mandates nine years of government-funded, compulsory school
attendance, which includes six years of primary school and three years
of junior high school. After graduating from junior high school,
students have to choose between senior high school and vocational
school. Senior high school students also have to choose between a
social-science and a natural-science orientation. This in turn affects
the test categories students later take during the National Higher
Education Entrance Examination, an academic examination not unlike the
SAT in the United States. The National Higher Education Entrance
Examination, or Gaokao, is considered the single most important exam in a
student’s entire life, since it determines whether he or she is allowed
to enter a university.
For those fortunate enough to pass the Gaokao, the choice of places
to go for study has dramatically increased recently. The number of
universities in China grew by 768 between 2005 and 2015. Among the top
twenty universities in Asia in 2017, ten were from the Greater China
area.19
The focus there has been not only on quantity but quality of higher
education. Established in 1998, the 985 Project is the Chinese
government’s program for raising the research standards of China’s best
universities. At the top of the pyramid is the so-called C9 League, the
nation’s top nine universities which are guaranteed 10 percent of
China’s entire national research budget.
One of those is Tsinghua University, which many call China’s MIT, and
which boasts two Nobel Prize winners on its science faculty. Another is
Peking University, which has extensive student exchange programs with
Western universities. There is also the University of Science and
Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, adjoining the new $11 billion
quantum research center that the government is building to secure
“quantum supremacy” for China.
The staffs of these leading schools aren’t limited to Chinese
scholars. Thanks to China’s “Thousand Talents” program launched in 2008,
Beijing maintains a coordinated effort to recruit the best and
brightest in key STEM areas among foreign scholars as well. Money is no
object when it comes to salaries and research support, and a visiting
professor at Tsinghua or USTC can count on a coterie of willing and able
research assistants. He or she may not even mind that many of those
assistants will go on to work for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and
develop the future weapons systems that could threaten the United
States and its allies in the future.
It’s an impressive, even formidable array of educational resources.
But problems and vulnerabilities remain. One is the sharp disparity
between the number of universities, and the quality of education,
between more urbanized eastern China (e.g., Shanghai, Canton, and
Beijing) and more backward western provinces.
Another, according to Hu Weiping, professor and director of the
Modern Teaching Technology Lab at Shaanxi Normal University, is that
while an increasing number of Chinese companies and schools have been
investing in STEM, the focus has tended to be on getting product results
instead of laying the groundwork for the future through fostering young
talent.
Hu has been quoted as saying that even though the National Natural
Science Foundation of China has been heavily funding education projects
since 2017, projects related to technology or science education haven’t
really benefited. “Without funding there won’t be input from scientists
or anyone else,” Hu said. “That’s why I have called on the foundation to
start working on this issue, so that more experts will be encouraged to
do more research on curriculum reform to stimulate technological
innovation.”
China’s STEM education also suffers from a major shortage of both
professional science teachers and proper science training for teachers.
About 80.5 percent of teachers involved in STEM subjects received no
serious science education, and many were at a middle or high school
education level, according to Hu.20
A recent study by Richard P. Appelbaum and Xueying Han pulled
together data from 731 surveys completed by STEM faculty at China’s top
twenty-five universities. They found “that the Chinese educational
system stifles creativity and the critical thinking necessary to achieve
innovative breakthroughs, too often hamstrings researchers with
bureaucratic requirements, and rewards quantity over quality.” “China’s
emphasis on rote learning and memorization reinforces this,” said
Appelbaum, “as does a strong cultural emphasis on respect for
authority.”
In the end, according to Dr. Han, “The challenges that are facing
China’s research environment are not things that can be easily fixed by
money. They’re cultural challenges, and that’s going to require a major
shift in thinking.”21
One way that the Chinese government has dealt with these deficiencies
is by accelerating the migration of its students to foreign
universities, especially U.S. universities. According to Han, “Foreign
degree holders get many advantages—higher salaries, easier access to promotions, bigger lab space—compared
to their domestic counterparts. . . . We discovered that Chinese
domestic degree holders also thought that a foreign degree would give
you better recognition from colleagues . . . and this recognition could
open doors that might not be available to domestic degree holders.”22
A STEM degree from an American university has particular cachet in
Chinese scientific circles. So it’s not surprising that hundreds of
thousands of Chinese STEM students have applied for and been granted
admittance to top U.S. universities, and given top-notch educations in
their chosen fields. Meanwhile, those same universities like Chinese
students because they pay their exorbitant tuition fees without
scholarships or complaint.
How large are the numbers? Every other year, ICE issues a report on
the enrollment of foreign students in the United States. According to
its latest report, “Sevis by the
Numbers: Biannual Report on International Student Trends,” issued in
April 2018, Chinese foreign students (377,070) by far outnumbered their
closest competitor India (211,700). While the report did not disclose
how many Chinese students are enrolled in STEM courses of study, in past
years more than half of all Chinese students enrolled in STEM programs.23
At the same time, Chinese engineering students take advantage of the
expanding opportunities to work in U.S. companies that are of strategic
interest to the Chinese government, where they are able to get training
and learn about technologies that they can bring back to China. This
supports not only Chinese industry but the People’s Liberation Army. As
one critic of the open-door policy toward China has put it, “When China
rattles its sabers at the United States and other countries around the
world, frequently those sabers were designed by those engineers who
received their education in the United States.”24
American universities aren’t the only targets. According to the
Australian Strategic Policy Institute, some 2,500 Chinese military
scientists have been steadily doing research at universities abroad
since 2007, often without disclosing their connections to the PLA.25
By any economic or national security measure, this Chinese penetration
of American university STEM programs has become a severe problem. It is
in effect a reverse brain drain. Chinese students are able to acquire a
first-rate education from programs that are in many cases funded by the
U.S. government as well as major private corporations and foundations.
They can then take that knowledge back to China to build similar
programs aimed at undermining our national security—not to mention engage in “extracurricular” activities such as spying and intellectual property theft from their professors.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute calls this “picking flowers
to make honey in China.” American intelligence agencies have a cruder
name for it: “Chinese Takeout.” It’s no wonder there’s a growing debate
about whether and how to restrict the number of Chinese nationals
studying in the United States, and which subjects they can study.
But a much larger lens is required to see the real problem, which is
not the large number of foreign students studying STEM in American
universities, but the declining number of American students doing the
same thing. This is going to demand a much bigger and more comprehensive
approach to reform than just putting restrictions on F-1 or M-1 visas.
It demands an approach much more akin to the one Sputnik triggered more
than sixty years ago, an approach that not only transformed U.S.
technology and science, but also the relationship between government and
education.
Sputnik and Its Impact
Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957. On December 30, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) published a
resolution calling for specialized training for teachers of science. On
January 28, 1958, President Eisenhower addressed Congress on how the
National Science Foundation was going to answer the need for more
scientists and science education. Less than one year later, Congress
approved a $1 billion funding bid for the National Defense Education Act
(1958), which involved the first complete overhaul of the American
education system from schools to universities at the federal level.
In very short order, President Eisenhower established the position of
Presidential Science Advisor, and the House and Senate reorganized
their committee structures to focus on science policy. Congress also
created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in
order to create a civilian space program, and tripled funding for the
National Science Foundation to improve science education.
What set off this remarkable explosion of federal effort, in effect
an “all-of-government” approach to improving America’s position as a
leader in science and science education? First, of course, was the fear
that Sputnik signaled that the United States was losing the space race
to the U.S.S.R. It was even feared that the U.S.S.R. would use
satellites like Sputnik to spy on America or to fire nuclear weapons
from space. Second, there was embarrassment that the United States,
which had proved so successful at forging the Arsenal of Democracy in
World War II, and winning the nuclear weapons race, and whose industrial
might was unparalleled in history, was somehow falling behind in the
next important race for the strategic future.26
Above all, Sputnik fed a suspicion that America’s problem stemmed
from an education system that was sadly out of step with the new
technological times. In the words of historian Paul Dickson, “Science
and mathematics education became, in the public’s eye, the solution to
winning the science and technology race with the Soviet Union and to
regaining global dominance.”27 As the Hartford Courant
noted, “one of the direct results of the sputniks has been that U.S.
people have been taking a long look at their educational system and the
program this country has for producing scientists and engineers.”28
Besides the fear of the Soviets, however, there were other reasons
behind this worry about the state of America’s science and mathematics
educational base. The introduction of the digital computer in the 1950s
and ’60s created a large demand for mathematicians, programmers, and
computer scientists in both the public and private sectors. Since
private companies, including defense companies, were drawing their
needed talent directly from universities, educational institutions
across the country were suffering from a dearth of STEM professors and
teachers, even as the GI Bill was rapidly expanding university
attendance and the postwar baby boom was about to add to the numbers of
children attending school.
America was also losing the generation of engineers, mathematicians,
and computer scientists from Europe who had dominated the American
scientific landscape during the 1930s and ’40s: figures like Albert
Einstein, Leo Szilard, and John von Neumann. That loss meant that the
country would need new domestic sources for the very highest and most
innovative scientific talent—sources that would have to compete with the Soviets’ ability to summon the talent it needed virtually on command.
This need for an educational reset was necessary at the top of the
intellectual pyramid, in our universities, but also throughout the
entire K–12 spectrum. In a speech to the National Education Association,
Vice President Nixon argued that America’s military and economic
strength was entirely dependent on the strength of our educational
system. If we lost leadership in the latter, our primacy in the former
was bound to suffer.29
These worries and the search for a solution culminated in the passage
of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958. Its goal was “to
strengthen the national defense and to encourage and assist in the
expansion and improvement of educational programs to meet critical
national needs.”
The act set aside more than a billion dollars over four years for
eight program titles, including student loans and scholarships (Title ii); money for strengthening science, math, and foreign language programs (Title iii); funding for graduate fellowships in certain critical areas of study (Title iv); funding for programs to identify talented and gifted students (Title v); money for research on more effective educational technologies (Title vii) as well as vocational and workforce training (Title viii).
The act also established the Science Information Institute and Science
Information Council to disseminate scientific information and advise the
government on various technical issues (Title ix).
What is striking is how the NDEA viewed STEM in a broader context and
sought to address the need for federal support of education as a whole,
including language training and “area studies” such as Latin American
studies (part of Title vi). Many
colleges and universities used these NDEA funds to create specialized
language laboratories. Specialized language classes also created a space
for other specialized classes, where gifted students could take
advanced math and science classes. Different streams of classes for
different levels of students were created at the high school and even
elementary levels of schooling.30
What was the overall impact of the post-Sputnik reforms? Sixty years
later, it’s hard to say, and harder to measure. To my knowledge, there
is still no good quantitative study of the impact of NDEA and other
programs coming out of the post-Sputnik reforms. Of course there was a
large increase in the numbers of students enrolling in STEM courses and
majoring in STEM subjects in the 1960s and ’70s, but it is not clear
whether this was due to the post-Sputnik education strategy or simply
followed from the overall growth in the numbers of students enrolling in
colleges and universities, including in STEM subjects. In 1940, about
half a million young people, barely 15 percent of college-age Americans,
were attending a higher education institution. By 1960 that number had
jumped to 3.6 million; by 1970 it had more than doubled again, with 7.5
million Americans, or 40 percent of college-age youth, attending a
college or university.31
Virtually every academic department was bound to see big increases in
numbers of students under that kind of demographic pressure, as well as
increases in numbers of teachers and instructors.
What we can say is that the post-Sputnik shakeup of American
education certainly had its downside. The growth of the bureaucracies
that federal funding generated, both at the government and the academic
level, soon diluted the NDEA mandates and the STEM offensive by pushing
money and attention into relatively minor or even worthless fields. The
word “science” soon proliferated in a number of unrelated subjects in
order to give them sufficient panache to get students and funding.
Programs like “business science” and “communications science” came to be
treated as if they were real STEM disciplines, instead of soft and
squishy versions of the real things.
Another egregious byproduct was the launching of New Math, made
popular by the Cambridge Conference on School Mathematics, which aimed
to achieve a radical acceleration of the elementary math curriculum so
that calculus could be introduced as a regular high school subject. New
Math was supposed to speed up the calculating proficiency of American
school children, but in most cases it had the opposite effect. The
bewildering flurry of concepts and abstractions borrowed from
mathematical logic—for example, Venn diagrams instead of old-fashioned multiplication tables and exercises in long division—certainly
killed my interest in mathematics early in my fourth-grade career. From
anecdotal evidence, my experience was not unique. The backlash against
New Math even had its comical aspects, including Harvard math professor
Tom Lehrer’s spoof of a lecture on New Math principles that declared,
“the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to
get the right answer,” and a 1965 Peanuts cartoon showing a youngster
stumbling through her new math assignment: “Sets . . . one to one
matching . . . equivalent sets . . . sets of one . . . sets of two . . .
renaming two. . . .” Finally, she throws back her head and bursts into
tears: “All I want to know is, how much is two and two?”
Underneath the comedy, however, was a genuine frustration with an
educational fad gone wrong, like the fate of so many educational fads—especially
when they have federal funding to encourage their spread. By the
mid-1960s, more than half of American high schools were confusing their
students with a New Math curriculum; a decade later it had spread to 85
percent of K–12 education.32 The fact that, a decade after that, U.S. math test scores seemed to be in free fall may not have been entirely coincidental.
Other critics would complain that the post-Sputnik agenda
overstressed and overfunded STEM education at the expense of the
humanities and liberal subjects such as history and literature (although
one can easily argue that far more damage to those subjects resulted
from the 1968 radicalism which still reverberates around schools and
universities today). And if declining STEM test scores and enrollments
since the 1980s are any indication, no one can claim that the impact of
the post-Sputnik push and NDEA on American STEM leadership was
particularly lasting.
All the same, one can equally claim that without the post-Sputnik
reforms, the computer revolution of the 1970s and ’80s, and the dot-com
revolution of the 1990s, would probably not have been possible.
Substantial credit for America’s IT leadership in the coming decades has
to go to the conscious effort to make science and technology cool and
exciting for young people, with an assist from new educational
technologies for the classroom like lab kits, overhead projectors,
films, and TV learning (the ancestor of today’s online learning).
It is also unlikely that the United States would have gained the
clear leadership in defense-related technologies that formed the basis
of the Pentagon’s Second Offset Strategy in the 1980s. Elements of this strategy—including
stealth technology, GPS, and networked warfare, along with the broad,
innovative technical and scientific industrial base that the federal
government organized and funded after 1958—won
the Cold War. Indeed, with Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative
speech in March 1983, we can hear distant echoes of the excitement and
optimism about the possibilities of American science and technology that
the post-Sputnik era launched a quarter century earlier.
On the other hand, one obstacle that American education reformers didn’t
face in 1958 was large numbers of Soviet students studying STEM
subjects in American universities and going home to help to arm the Red
Army, let alone steal research and intellectual property from their
professors and colleagues. Nor did we have visa programs that promoted
Soviet enrollment in American universities, nor were those same
institutions eager to welcome Soviet students into their physics labs
and engineering programs with open arms.
Yet that is precisely the situation we face today in our STEM
competition with China. In this respect, we are facing an American STEM
crisis that is substantially more complex than the one we faced sixty
years ago, and one which demands solutions even more radical and
disruptive than those Sputnik inspired. Because when a headline-grabbing
event like Sputnik occurs this time—e.g., a Chinese quantum computer that can penetrate our most vulnerable public encryption systems—it will almost certainly be too late to do anything about it.
Recommendations
On September 10, 2018, on the eve of the seventeenth anniversary of the attack on 9/11, I wrote a Forbes column entitled, “America’s High-Tech STEM Crisis.” In that column, I wrote of America’s declining STEM leadership:
We are fast approaching another Sputnik moment, we can’t
afford to ignore. Our national security, as well as economic security,
depend on addressing it. We need major high-tech companies like Google
and Microsoft; leading universities and colleges; the White House, the
Department of Education and the Department of Defense; to come together
to craft a high-tech STEM education strategy that can lead us forward to
the future.33
Three months later, the White House released its plans for a five-year STEM strategy.34
The report is an important document, with large sections devoted to
summarizing a strategy to increase U.S. leadership in science and
engineering, and creating more economic opportunities for Americans with
a STEM education, especially for women and minorities.
Unfortunately, what’s missing is a commitment to specifically address
the outstanding national security issues America’s STEM crisis entails,
especially those relating to topics such as computer engineering and
cybersecurity, AI, quantum, and robotics. Hence there is still room for a
broader strategy that incorporates more input from our Defense
Department and intelligence community, as well as those academic
communities whose work in these areas will have a direct impact on our
ability to defend ourselves in the future, and cooperation with allies
such as Japan, Israel, NATO, and the Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, the United Kingdom, and United States) on the high-tech
frontier.
It is also important to realize that this crisis is not one that’s
going to wait for the marketplace to solve. Markets are notoriously bad
at allocating resources in a crisis, but particularly educational
resources because of the time lag involved and other factors. For
example, there was a rush of people going into petroleum engineering at
precisely the moment oil markets crashed in 2014–15. And when MBAs from
Harvard and other prestigious schools flood a business zone, that’s
usually a good sign that a bubble is about to burst.
In addition, some have argued that much of the current dependence on
foreign students and H-1B visa employees happened by design, so that
American companies could avoid having to pay full U.S. market prices for
this kind of high-tech, highly skilled labor.35
Be that as it may, it seems obvious that strong and insightful
government action on this front is imperative. The question is, what
kind?
The issue that has generated the most attention and concrete action
to date is the growing number of Chinese nationals, including
postdoctoral students and professors, studying and working in the United
States—a complex situation given the
extent to which American universities have come to rely upon these
students. In June 2018, the Trump administration announced plans to
limit the time Chinese graduate students will be allowed to study in
certain critical areas of high-tech research, including robotics,
aeronautics, and high-tech manufacturing, from five years to one.36 On December 2, 2018, Voice of America reported: “US Considers New Restrictions on Chinese Students.”37
The gist of the story was that American officials have growing worries
about spying by Chinese students who are studying in the United States,
and about the loss of new technologies important for national security
to China through their efforts. In addition to the new visa
restrictions, officials are considering whether to carry out additional
investigations of Chinese students attending U.S. schools. Reuters
reported that officials want to examine student phone calls. They are
also considering looking at students’ personal accounts on Chinese and
U.S. social media sites.38
But again, the issue of Chinese students needs to be seen in a larger
lens. The greater focus should be on how we get more Americans,
especially young Americans, to study and get excited about STEM
subjects, especially the high-tech STEM disciplines that have crucial
national security implications.
One approach would be to designate certain STEM subjects, such as AI
or additive manufacturing, as a “critical knowledge base” as described
under the NDEA, and offer government scholarships and funding (including
Department of Defense funding) that can be directed to those students
and researchers working on that knowledge base. This could be
supplemented by encouraging universities and colleges to offer tuition
waivers for those same students—a powerful
incentive at a time when virtually every college grad leaves school
with an enormous loan millstone around his or her neck.
Another approach involves more direct coordination with the high-tech
corporate sector. The White House report says very little about more
effective coordination between the government and private sector, both
to improve education and career opportunities in the United States as
well as to advance critical research. The work done at America’s
corporate labs was an important part of the response to Sputnik sixty
years ago. Many of those labs do not exist today, but responding to the
present STEM crisis will involve mobilizing resources across society. It
cannot remain limited to a few government agencies.
Finally, there needs to be a K–12 teaching offensive, aimed
specifically at those “critical knowledge bases.” It should incorporate
new thinking about how to teach math and science as well as old—old,
that is, in terms of best-practice models, including those of countries
that consistently outperform us in the international rankings. Trying
to import wholesale the pedagogical techniques from Japanese or
Taiwanese classrooms may not work from a cultural point of view
(although certain American “tiger moms” might disagree). But some
applicable lessons might nevertheless be learned by studying these
techniques. The United States might also borrow more from Norway or
Estonia, which consistently score very well on international tests like
PISA, and which could provide constructive models for STEM education in
American schools.
The bottom line is that STEM education has become too important to be
left to the educators any longer, or to the educational bureaucrats.
It’s high time the Department of Defense and national security agencies
weigh in, as they did post-Sputnik, so that America’s future doesn’t
pass into the hands of foreign nationals, no matter how talented or
willing, by default.
Sixty years ago, America’s effort to seize global STEM leadership
helped to put astronauts on the moon. Today, who can say where retaking
STEM leadership can lead us in the twenty-first century? And who can say
what the costs might be if we fail?
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume III, Number 1 (Spring 2019): 127–48.
Notes
The author thanks Brent Cronce, Thomas Keelan, and Kate Rouleau at the Hudson Institute for their assistance with this article.
1 William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 2013), 93.
2 Arthur Herman, “The Pentagon’s ‘Smart’ Revolution,” Commentary, June 2016.
3 Arthur Herman, “Winning the Race in Quantum Computing,” American Affairs 2, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 96–113.
4 Bennett and Wilezol, 94.
5 Committee on STEM Education, “Charting a Course for
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6 Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA 2015 Results, vol. 1, Excellence and Equity in Education (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2016).
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14 Batalova and Zong.
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24 Michael Cutler, “Trump Administration Restricts Chinese Students,” Frontpage, December 25, 2018.
25 Echo Huang and Isabella Steger, “Foreign Universities are Unwittingly Collaborating with Chinese Military Scientists,” Quartz, October 29, 2018.
26 Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Walker, 2001).
27 Dickson.
28 Keith Schonrock, “Russian Gains Make Americans Take Long Look at Education,” Hartford Courant, December 15, 1957.
29 Proceedings of the National Education Association 95, (1957).
30 Barbara Barksdale Clowse, “Brainpower for the Cold War:
The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958
(Contributions to the Study of Education),” 1981.
31 National Center for Education Statistics, “120 Years of
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32 Jeffrey W. Miller, “Whatever Happened to New Math?,” American Heritage 41, no. 8 (December 1990).
33 Arthur Herman, “America’s High-Tech STEM Crisis,” Forbes, September 10, 2018.
34 Committee on STEM Education.
35 Eric R. Weinstein, “How & Why Government,
Universities, & Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of
Scientists & High-Tech Workers,” Institute for New Economic
Thinking, March 28, 2017.
36 Josh Lederman and Ted Bridis, “US to Impose Limits on Some Chinese Visas,” Associated Press, May 29, 2018.
37 Mario Ritter Jr., “US Considers New Restrictions on Chinese Students,” VOA Learning English, December 2, 2018.
38 Matt Spetalnick and Patricia Zengerle, “Exclusive:
Fearing Espionage, U.S. Weighs Tighter Rules on Chinese Students,”
Reuters, November 29, 2018.