Science Called Key To U.S. Competitiveness

In an era of increasing globalization and foreign competition in high-skill jobs, the U.S. government and the private sector must renew their commitment to technological innovation to maintain the nation's competitive edge, say scholars at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

"To remain at the leading edge of the technological frontier, the U.S. must make more workers literate in science and engineering, must embrace a redesigned system of national investments in scientific research, and must adopt more effective incentives for private-sector firms to undertake R&D," Peter R. Orszag, director of Brookings' Hamilton Project, told a media briefing on Dec. 4. The project is examining the link between technological progress and U.S. economic growth.

To continue as a leading center of research, says Harvard University economics professor Richard B. Freeman, the U.S. not only must increase public investment in basic research, it must ensure an adequate supply of scientific talent.

"In the early 1960s, faced with the Sputnik challenge from the Soviet Union, NSF granted about 1,000 graduate research fellowships a year for science and engineering work," Freeman says. Today, despite a threefold increase in the number of college students graduating with bachelor's degrees in science and engineering, he says, the U.S. still grants the same number of National Science Foundation fellowships.

"I think inadvertently, we are sending a signal to young people that it is less desirable to go into science and engineering than it was in the 1960s," Freeman remarks.

He proposes tripling the number of graduate research fellowships and increasing the value of those awards from $30,000 to $40,000 per year. Together, these changes would cost the government about $375 million per year.

Freeman says his research shows that this would be an efficient way to increase the number of undergraduates who go on to graduate studies and a career in science and engineering, thereby strengthening the U.S. scientific base. "It would send a dramatic signal to American students that the country wants them to specialize in these areas," he remarks.

Another step the U.S. should take, argues Thomas Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at the University of California, Berkeley, is to expand the use of government prizes for innovative achievements in science and technology.

He notes the effectiveness of inducement prizes, such as the recently awarded $10 million Ansari X Prize for human spaceflight, and suggests that government prizes for specific achievements in science and technology can be more effective at spurring innovation than traditional government grants or contracts.

Prizes are particularly useful when the government can define a research goal in concrete terms but is uncertain about the most likely means to achieve the goal or who is in the best position to do so, Kalil says.