• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1166 0

the matter. They quickly realized that the Asian totals included graduates of two- and three-year programs—people getting diplomas in simple technical tasks. A group of professors at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University traveled to China and India to collect data from governmental and nongovernmental sources and interview businessmen and academics. They concluded that eliminating graduates of two- or three-year programs halves the Chinese figure, to around 350,000 graduates, and even this number is probably significantly inflated by differing definitions of “engineer” that often include auto mechanics and industrial repairmen. Bialik notes that the National Science Foundation, which tracks these statistics in the United States and other nations, puts the Chinese number at about 200,000 degrees per year. Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, puts the number of Indian graduates at 120,000–130,000 a year. That means the United States actually trains more engineers per capita than either India or China does.14

And the numbers don’t address the issue of quality. As someone who grew up in India, I have a healthy appreciation for the virtues of its famous engineering academies, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). Their greatest strength is that they administer one of the world’s most ruthlessly competitive entrance exams. Three hundred thousand people take it, five thousand are admitted—an acceptance rate of 1.7 percent (compared with 9 to 10 percent for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton). The people who make the mark are the best and brightest out of one billion. Place them in any educational system, and they will do well. In fact, many of the IITs are decidedly second-rate, with mediocre equipment, indifferent teachers, and unimaginative classwork. Rajiv Sahney, who attended IIT and then went to Caltech, says, “The IITs’ core advantage is the entrance exam, which is superbly designed to select extremely intelligent students. In terms of teaching and facilities, they really don’t compare with any decent American technical institute.” And once you get beyond the IITs and other such elite academies—which graduate under ten thousand students a year—the quality of higher education in China and India remains extremely poor, which is why so many students leave those countries to get trained abroad.

The data affirm these anecdotal impressions. In 2005, the McKinsey Global Institute did a study of “the emerging global labor market” and found that a sample of twenty-eight low-wage countries had approximately 33 million young professionals* at their disposal, compared with just 15 million in a sample of eight higher-wage nations (the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and South Korea).15 But how many of these young professionals in low-wage countries had the skills necessary to compete in a global marketplace? “Only a fraction of potential job candidates could successfully work at a foreign company,” the study reported, pointing to several explanations, chiefly poor educational quality. In both India and China, it noted, beyond the small number of top-tier academies, the quality and quantity of education is low. Only 10 percent of Indians get any kind of postsecondary education. Thus, despite enormous demand for engineers, there are relatively few well-trained ones. Wages of trained engineers in both countries are rising by 15 percent a year, a sure sign that demand is outstripping supply. (If you were an employer and had access to tens of thousands of well-trained engineers coming out of colleges every year, you would not have to give your employees 15 percent raises year after year.)

Higher education is America’s best industry. There are two rankings of universities worldwide. In one of them, a purely quantitative study done by Chinese researchers, eight of the top ten universities in the world are in the United States. In the other, more qualitative one by London’s Times Higher Educational Supplement, it’s seven. The numbers flatten