The National Science Foundation has issued its latest report on graduate-student enrollment in science & engineering fields, taking a decade of data up through 2010. There are now about 560,000 graduate students enrolled in S&E fields at any one time, nationwide. Among these are the people who do most of the actual lab work on federally and industrially sponsored research conducted at our nation’s universities and colleges. They are the elite of the STEM workforce: those who aren’t bound for academic and educational careers may start companies or staff big corporate R&D centers.
As usual, the NSF statisticians have done an excellent job calling out the major trends. Over the decade, one sees faster overall enrollment growth in engineering fields than in science; extremely rapid growth in biomedical engineering; and above-average growth for both women and almost all non-white minorities. Though we’re cautioned not to make too much of the year-over-years, in the 2009/2010 comparison I think it’s possible to to see the effects of priorities in the federal research budget favoring physical sciences, earth sciences, and the range of engineering disciplines pertinent to the renewable-energy and advanced-manufacturing sectors. All that’s good news.
One other observation the report makes is that graduate enrollment grew at the same rate for U.S. citizens and permanent residents as for temporary visa holders. This is bad news: after a decade of growth in graduate enrollments, some 30% of all graduate students are still here on visas that virtually guarantee their return home when they graduate. Either that, or they can place themselves at the tender mercies of an employer willing to offer a “sponsored” visa like the H-1B, a boon that can be withheld at will and thus a virtual guarantee of wage suppression.
Our disgraceful failure to offer full-fledged permanent residency to foreign students who have earned graduate degrees here not only insults the foreign born and strengthens our potential economic rivals, but it really presents American-born students with a very unhelpful object lesson: that their reward for graduate study in the STEM disciplines is to see many of the available jobs filled at preference by the exploited, often as a way-station to their complete offshoring. If we want students to study the STEM disciplines through graduate school and put those skills to work here rather than in some other nation, let’s reward all who do so with the loyalty of a grateful society.
Tagged as:
Engineering,
NSF,
STEM
An interesting report on New York City’s powerful wave of digital-technology startups has issued from the Center for an Urban Future (a non-partisan think tank where I’m a long-time advisor and occasional author, though not involved in this report).
The report “New Tech City” does a solid job capturing the way Internet-enabled startups (supercharged these days by mobile technology) have begun to cluster and thrive in a way they did not back in the dot-com 1990s. As the report correctly notes, the secret sauce has been a new enthusiasm by City government and civic leadership for facilitating healthy symbiosis between digital entrepreneurs and the several sectors where the City already boasts world-dominating business clusters. Mainly, that means the media/publishing/advertising sectors, finance (toujours finance), and what might be called the creative/cultural/educational complex. These happen to be clusters that both exhibit clear vulnerability to disruption and wield enormous purchasing power.
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
CUF,
Engineering,
NYC
Three years ago, when the merger between NYU and Polytechnic University was just under way, I wrote a well received opinion piece arguing that aggressive development of New York City’s university-based engineering research programs might prove key to its ambitions to become a center of technology-based business development. I even argued that competition in this arena (between NYU-Poly and Columbia) would be salutary. Apparently, someone was listening, but not exactly in the way I expected!
Some months ago, New York City issued a “request for expressions of interest,” seeking to identify academic institutions anywhere in the world that might want to develop what the City called an “applied science and engineering research campus.” Today, the City announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest, and clearly had met its goal of stimulating worldwide interest. Represented in the pool were a number of strong U.S. institutions (some being usual suspects, and others a bit of surprise) and also institutions in Canada, France, Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Switzerland, and the U.K. Pretty impressive!
The obvious question is why even try and bring in outside institutions — as good as they might be — rather than get behind the growth ambitions of the three largest in-city engineering research programs? Why start from scratch when you can build on gathering strength? Engineering is engineering, and it can be done well or badly, with strong commitment to industrial partnership or not, but there’s nothing magic about Stanford, Cornell, Purdue, or Carnegie Mellon. It’s about size, scale, momentum, and institutional leadership, and the home teams will always be larger than the NYC “satellites” of institutions based elsewhere. So why the competition? No one has been able to give me a good answer, so what follows is purely my own speculation. Feel free to contradict me in the comments.
[continue reading…]
Tagged as:
Engineering,
NYC
