International Comparisons: Glass Half-Full, Glass Half-Empty?
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
—Josh Billings1
Over the past two to three decades important shifts have taken place in international comparisons and “rankings” of countries concerning their research and development (R&D) in science and engineering. The same can be said for international comparisons of the effectiveness of science and mathematics education at primary, secondary, and higher levels.
The dominant position of the United States during the decades after World War II is apparent in standard indicators of such comparisons such as the volume of published scientific articles, numbers of patents issued, and production of STEM graduate degrees awarded. As noted earlier, of course, this postwar dominance of the United States itself represented a major shift from the leading positions held by a succession of European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany) over the preceding two centuries.
During the same postwar decades the science and engineering capacities of the Soviet Union expanded rapidly, driven by heavy national investments in military and space research and development, and by production of large numbers of graduates in science, math, and engineering fields. Indeed, as described in earlier chapters, this led to U.S. alarums during the 1950s that the Soviet Union was pulling ahead in these fields, resulting in massive U.S. government investments in the “space race” and in expansion of science and mathematics education. The subsequent economic and political weakening of the USSR during the 1980s, and its ultimate collapse in 1991, sharply reduced science and engineering activities in its successor states of the Russian Federation and other former Soviet republics.
From the 1990s onward, U.S. investments and capabilities in science and engineering continued to expand substantially. Yet the U.S. predominance in these fields that had been achieved during the postwar decades also began to gradually erode, as countries in both Europe and Asia began to catch up.
This narrowing over the past two decades in U.S. dominance in science, engineering, and mathematics has led some commentators to re-sound the alarm that the United States is in danger of falling behind its major competitors for global leadership in these fields. Typically such concerns are linked to other worries about declines (again in relative terms) of U.S. economic performance, as measured for example by sustained massive trade deficits driven by offshore-outsourcing of manufacturing to low-wage countries during a period of rapid economic globalization. Taken together, these trends have led to arguments that the decline (again, we must emphasize, in relative terms) of U.S. dominance in science and engineering portends gloomy economic prospects for the United States, based on arguments that economic competitiveness now is determined by science and technology driving “innovation.”2
Such views have been expressed most forcefully by some leaders in corporations, higher education, and politics. Indeed, the 2010 follow-up report of the committee that produced the National Academies 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm discussed in chapter 1, whose membership was dominated by leaders of major corporations and universities, drew heavily upon international comparisons to reach a provocative and memorable conclusion framed in a ten-word sentence:
“The Gathering Storm increasingly appears to be a Category 5.”3
In support of its conclusion, the 2010 follow-up report offered a list of what it called “factoids” in its Executive Summary:4
China is now second in the world in its publication of biomedical research articles, having recently surpassed Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Spain.
In 2009, 51 percent of United States patents were awarded to non-United States companies.
Only four of the top ten companies receiving United States patents last year were United States companies.
The World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th in quality of mathematics and science education.
The legendary Bell Laboratories is now owned by a French company.
In 2000 the number of foreign students studying the physical sciences and engineering in United States graduate schools for the first time surpassed the number of United States students.
In 1998 China produced about 20,000 research articles, but by 2006 the output had reached 83,000 … overtaking Japan, Germany and the U.K.
Eight of the ten global companies with the largest R&D budgets have established R&D facilities in China, India or both.
In a survey of global firms planning to build new R&D facilities, 77 percent say they will build in China or India.
GE has now located the majority of its R&D personnel outside the United States.
The United States ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.
The United States ranks 20th in high school completion rate among industrialized nations and 16th in college completion rate.
In less than 15 years, China has moved from 14th place to second place in published research articles (behind the United States).
China’s Tsinghua and Peking Universities are the two largest suppliers of students who receive PhD’s—in the United States.
The United States has fallen from first to eleventh place in the OECD in the fraction 25–34 year olds that has graduated high school. The older portion of the U.S. workforce ranks first among OECD populations of the same age.
In 2007 China became second only to the United States in the estimated number of people engaged in scientific and engineering research and development.
Such conclusions have been contested as exaggerations by other knowledgeable observers. As discussed in earlier chapters, a number of rounds of similar concerns about the United States falling behind in science and engineering arose in prior decades, and led to responses that contributed to cycles of “alarm/boom/bust.” It is quite true that many such claims in the past may have been “crying wolf.”
Yet the fact that during these previous cycles the wolf turned out to not be at the door should not lead to the conclusion that present concerns also can be predicted to prove unwarranted. There is ample historical evidence that leadership in these fields can shift, sometimes rapidly. As noted earlier, European leadership in science and engineering over an extended period from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the onset of World War II gave way to American leadership in the decades following that war. The relative position of the former Soviet Union also rose rapidly during the postwar period, and then fell behind from the 1990s onward.
No one can see the future, but it would be wise to consider and assess the evidence that the United States is now falling behind its major competitors in science, engineering, and mathematics. Inevitably, available evidence on such a topic is likely to be mixed or ambiguous. How should an objective observer interpret it?
Still the World Leader, but Less Dominant than 2–3 Decades Ago
Any discussion of this topic should emphasize from the outset that the trends described relate only to relative decline. The most recent data still show the United States to be the leading center of higher education, basic research, and patenting in the world. The National Science Board provided a balanced appraisal in its most recent report Science and Engineering Indicators 2012:
In most broad aspects of S&T activities, the United States continues to maintain a position of leadership but has experienced a gradual erosion of its position in many specific areas. Two contributing developments are the rapid increase in a broad range of Asian S&T capabilities outside of Japan and the fruition of EU efforts to boost its relative competitiveness in R&D, innovation, and high technology.5
R&D expenditures: Consider first the levels of expenditures on research and development (R&D). At a global level such expenditures have been rising more rapidly than economic output. Indeed, through 2009 global R&D expenditures had been on a path that would lead to a doubling in only nine years,6 although the subsequent global financial crisis no doubt has led to some decline in this rapid rate of increase.
Within these global totals, R&D expenditures in the United States continue to be by far the largest of any country. Of the estimated global R&D total of $1,276 billion in 2009, the United States alone accounted for nearly $402 billion, or more than 31 percent. The next largest national expenditures on R&D in 2009 were those of China (12 percent), followed by Japan (nearly 11 percent), Germany (6 percent), and France (4 percent). U.S. R&D expenditures exceeded those of the next three largest combined—China, Japan, and Germany. The combined R&D expenditures of all twenty-seven member nations of the European Union accounted for about 23 percent of total R&D expenditures in 2009.7
However, since total U.S. GDP also is the highest in the world, it may be argued that comparisons of national R&D expenditures should be assessed not in absolute terms but instead as a percentage of GDP. In this kind of comparison, U.S. R&D expenditures are also high by international comparative standards—nearly 2.9 percent of 2009 GDP—though lower than the percentages in Japan and South Korea, as well as some other smaller countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, and Israel, all of which were 3 percent or higher.8 In China this ratio of R&D to GDP has been rising rapidly, but from far lower levels—it is up two and a half times in just over a decade, but from a very low base of only 0.6 percent in 1996, rising to 1.7 percent in 2009. Over the past decade China’s GDP has also been expanding far more rapidly than that of the United States, averaging on the order of 12 percent per year,9 meaning that the absolute volume of R&D expenditures in China was rising rapidly. The same general point could be made about trends in South Korea, but not about Japan where the economy has been relatively stagnant since the 1990s.
Several clarifications about the category “Research and Development (R&D)” need to be mentioned here. First, R&D expenditures are usually divided into three types: basic research, applied research, and development. Of these, basic research (part of the “R”) is the smallest of the three categories, generally accounting for less than 20 percent. Applied research also accounts for a small fraction—about 20 percent in the U.S. data. It is “development” (the “D” in “R&D”) that has long been by far the largest component of R&D, amounting to about 60 percent of the total in the United States over the past decade,10 and even higher percentages in other countries. To put the matter in another way, only 20 percent of R&D expenditure falls under the rubric of “basic research,” while 80 percent is devoted to either “applied research” or “development,” of which the latter is by far the largest.
This is relevant to public discourse on the subject, much of which seems, oddly, to focus on trends in the smallest of the three R&D categories, that of basic research. In the U.S. data, this is the only category for which the federal government is the majority funder (at 57 percent) and for which universities are the majority performers (at 56 percent). Meanwhile, businesses performed and funded over 60 percent of the applied research category, and well over 80 percent of “development.”11
Another important underlying driver of R&D expenditures is the fact that manufacturing industries almost universally invest more of revenues in R&D (although still only about 4–5 percent, and primarily in “D”) than do service sector industries. This implies that countries with large and/or growing manufacturing activities would be expected to show relatively high or increasing expenditures in R&D—the cases of Japan, South Korea, and most recently China offer good examples of economies with very strong or rapidly increasing manufacturing activities and hence high or growing levels of R&D.12 Meanwhile these R&D-intensive manufacturing activities in the United States have been declining with the offshore outsourcing accompanying the current wave of globalization.
The patterns of R&D expenditures in most advanced countries are determined primarily by industry rather than by governments. Governments generally are minority direct funders of R&D in their economies. They may provide tax and other incentives in support of R&D, but the bulk of direct R&D funding comes from the business sector. Having said that, it also is the case that many governments, especially in Asia, have adopted policies designed to stimulate and incentivize R&D activities in their societies, driven by the belief that these will be the leaders of their future economic development.13 Their actions have included both direct and indirect measures:
• effective government control of some key industries, as in the case of China;
• direct subsidies for R&D-intensive manufacturing designed for export;
• indirect but major incentives (financial, capital, and taxation) and sometimes even mandates to ensure that multinational firms invest substantially in R&D activities in return for approval to market their products in these countries;
• investments in government research funding and in rapid expansion of higher education systems.
The net effects of this combination of rapidly growing GDPs in some Asian countries, coupled with rising ratios of R&D expenditures to GDP, has indeed produced relative shifts in the “shares” of global R&D expenditures. Between 1996 and 2009, the share of global R&D in North America (here combining the United States, Canada, and Mexico) declined from 40 percent to 36 percent, and the EU share from 31 percent to 24 percent. Over the same period, the Asia/Pacific region’s share increased from 24 percent to 35 percent.14 During this period R&D expenditures increased in all of these regions, hence the shifts in global shares reflect differing rates of increase rather than increases in some and declines in others.
What about comparative international trends in higher education? During the latter half of the twentieth century the U.S. share of global higher education at all levels was very high. The most comprehensive category of higher education, known as “tertiary” education, is defined by international convention to include all higher education at or above the level of U.S. technical schools or associate degrees. By this measure, the United States in 1970 produced more than 30 percent of all “tertiary” education graduates in the world.15 If we narrow our lens to examine only the highest level of “doctoral” education, and only in science and engineering fields, U.S. universities in that year accounted for more than 50 percent of such doctorates.16
This U.S. super-dominance of global higher education was driven by a number of specifically twentieth-century elements:
• The development of mass higher education at all levels in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, and its subsequent expansion;
• The wartime damage to universities and scientific research in Europe, which previously had dominated higher education in science and engineering, along with movement to the United States of many leading European scientists escaping the depredations of the Nazis and the war and subsequent Cold War in Europe;
• Massive expansion of U.S. government funding of research and doctoral education in science and mathematics in response to the shock of Sputnik 1 (see chapter 2);
• Decades of political instability, slow economic growth, and weak university-level education and research in post-revolutionary China.
Within the past two to three decades these drivers of American postwar exceptionalism in higher education have begun to wane, driven by the recovery of economic prosperity and of science and technology in the war- and revolution-battered countries of Europe and Asia. Some of these recoveries of course were actively supported by U.S. government policies such as the Marshall Plan, the Allied occupation of Japan, and promotion of trade globalization. In addition, the same period has seen the emergence of dynamic economic growth and educational expansion in other countries, especially in Asia, including South Korea, Taiwan, China, and most recently India.
In the latter two cases of China and India, the huge scale of their populations (each more than four times the size of the 2013 U.S. population of over 315 million) means that even small increases in the percentages with science and engineering education can represent very large absolute and relative numbers. The most dramatic growth in this period has been in China, in which the government decided to promote extraordinary expansion of higher education and invested heavily in doing so. Between 1980 and 2000, China’s fraction of the world’s tertiary-educated population increased from about 5 percent to more than 12 percent, and India’s, from 4 percent to 8 percent.17
Yet even with notable narrowing of the very large gaps that prevailed only a few decades ago, the United States apparently continues to have the largest fraction of the population with tertiary education. In 2009 the U.S. accounted for some 25.8 percent of the estimated 222 million with tertiary education in the G-20 countries.18 This figure was well over twice those for the countries with the next largest percentages—12.1 percent in China (for 2000, the latest available, and hence no doubt considerably larger now), and
11.4 percent in Japan—and five times larger than all other reporting countries, none of which report more than 5 percent.19
First University Degrees
As noted earlier, the United States led development of mass higher education during the 1950s and 1960s, but other countries began to catch up in subsequent decades by rapidly expanding the percentage of their young adult cohorts obtaining first university (or “bachelor’s”) degrees. In 1975, the United States exceeded all other countries in this indicator, with 4.72 bachelor’s degrees per hundred population aged 20–24 years. In the years that followed, the U.S. ratio continued to increase, but the rates of increase were much higher in a number of countries (mostly in Europe, with a few in Asia such as Taiwan and South Korea) that by 2005 had overtaken the United States in the ratio of bachelor’s degrees to the population aged 20–24.
Meanwhile, China began the massive expansion of its higher education system (to be sure with many unanswered questions as to quality). In 1990 there were only 0.21 bachelor’s degrees per hundred 20–24-year-olds in China; by 2005 this proportion had increased nearly sevenfold, to 1.45. Obviously this was still a small ratio when compared to the 6.83 in the United States for that same year (not to mention the 11.30 figure for Taiwan). Yet the size of the Chinese cohort aged 20–24 was so enormous that the absolute number of bachelor’s degrees in China began to converge with the numbers awarded in the United States, given its much smaller population.
Chinese higher education is also distinctive in another way: its very heavy concentration upon science and engineering, as discussed in greater detail in the section immediately following. The arithmetic of this concentration upon natural sciences and engineering, combined with very rapid expansion in undergraduate education in general, produced dramatic growth in the number of Chinese first degrees in these fields, as shown in figure 7.1.
First university natural sciences and engineering degrees, by selected countries, 1999–2008.
Source: National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, p. 2-33, fig. 2-27.
Differing Proportions in Natural Sciences and Engineering
For our purposes here it is also important to understand that even as it led the development of mass university education, bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. universities have long included a smaller fraction of concentrators (or “majors”) in the fields of natural sciences and engineering (NS&E) than have those awarded by universities in many other countries. In 1975, for example, about 16 percent of U.S. degrees were in this NS&E category—a level comparable to Austria, Denmark, and Belgium, but well below those in most other advanced industrial countries for which such data were available. For example, the percentage of first university degrees in the NS&E category for that same year in other countries with large populations and economies were: 46 percent in France, 38 percent in South Korea, 35 percent in Taiwan, 32 percent in Germany, and 41 percent in the United Kingdom.20
As higher education in general expanded rapidly in these countries, their higher percentages of NS&E graduates tended to decline somewhat but still remained higher than the U.S. ratio, which was (remarkably) stable at about 16 percent.21 The arithmetically inevitable result was higher ratios of NS&E degrees per hundred persons aged 20–24 in most developed countries than in the United States. Indeed, research by Burelli and Rapoport at the National Science Foundation indicates that the dominant reason for the increases in this measure was not a shift toward higher percentages of bachelor’s degrees in NS&E fields, but rather simply the expansion in the overall numbers of bachelor’s degrees awarded.22
The most recent comparative international data available, for about the year 2006, indicate that for the United States the ratio of NS&E degrees was
15.6 percent, while the ratios continued to be much higher for countries such as France (26.8 percent), South Korea (36.5 percent), Taiwan (37.2 percent), Germany (29.1 percent), and the United Kingdom (22.4 percent).23
The same source reports that the percentage of NS&E degrees in China was remarkably high: 44.4 percent.24 As will be discussed in greater detail, this extraordinarily high total was due primarily to an astounding 31.2 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in China reported to be in engineering. Only Singapore, a city-state of less than 275 square miles or 700 square kilometers, with only 5 million inhabitants, reported a slightly higher percentage of bachelor’s degrees in engineering, at 33.9%. In comparison, the percentage of bachelor’s degrees in the natural sciences in China was far lower than that for engineering—only 13.2 percent—and not markedly higher than that of the United States at 11.2 percent.
There is a considerable debate in the analytic literature about Chinese data on degrees in “engineering.” Several research groups have produced analyses raising numerous questions, including whether the large Chinese numbers reflect comparable levels of higher education, include the same fields of study, and reflect comparable standards of quality as those of the countries to which they are compared.25 For example, it appears that the Chinese data on “engineering” degrees may include two-year technical training certifications equivalent to associate degrees in the United States, and the term “engineer” may be interpreted in China to include what might be considered “technician” or “mechanic” in other countries.
Appropriate adjustments should certainly be applied before international comparisons are made. However, it still seems likely that an exceptionally high percentage of legitimate “bachelor’s” degrees in China are in engineering fields. In part this is driven by government decisions that affect the allocation of specialization fields in Chinese higher education. It is often remarked that since the beginning of the Chinese Communist revolution the political leadership has included large numbers with engineering backgrounds.
In addition, the massive expansion of infrastructure under way in China has created enormous labor market demand for engineering skills. Consider for example the magnitudes of construction of high-speed roads, railways, and navigable channels that was undertaken in China between 1997 and 2007, compared with comparable figures for the United States, as summarized in table 7.1. During this eleven-year period, over 30,000 miles of new high-speed highways were built in China, versus just over 600 in the United States. Over the same period nearly 7,500 miles of railways were constructed in China versus a decline of over 4,000 miles in the United States. Infrastructure projects of this type are heavy employers of engineering talent, primarily in civil engineering, hence the massive expansion of Chinese infrastructure has produced an enormous domestic demand for engineers to plan, design, and supervise their construction. In the United States in contrast there was, if anything, dis-investment in infrastructure, especially in the rail sector.
Table 7.1. Growth of Infrastructure between 1997 and 2007, United States and China
| Length in Miles | United States | China |
| Interstate/Expressway | 608 | 30,519 |
| Navigable Channels | (680) | 8,510 |
| Rail | (4,030) | 7,436 |
Source: Hal Salzman and Leonard Lynn, “Engineering and Engineering Skills: What’s really needed for global competitiveness,” Paper presented at Annual Meetings of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, November 4, 2010, Boston, MA, p. 7.
Data Sources: For United States: Bureau of Transport Statistics, U.S. Department of Transportation, National Transport Statistics, 2009. For China: National Bureau of Statistics of China, China Statistical Yearbook, 2008.
International Differences in Student Choice of Concentrations
Meanwhile, several unusual attributes of U.S. higher education also warrant some special attention. As noted in chapter 6 of this volume, the U.S. system of higher education is a large, highly diversified, and atypical amalgam of literally thousands of institutions. These include world-class research universities with strong PhD programs; professional schools in law and medicine; “comprehensive” and “masters-focused” universities combining both undergraduate and graduate degree programs; undergraduate “liberal arts” colleges; and community colleges concentrating upon the first two years of postsecondary education. There is also a large and rapidly growing higher education sector that is operated by for-profit corporations.
Without digressing into a lengthy discussion of its strengths and weaknesses, two unusual aspects of the U.S. higher education system are worth recalling in any discussion of student choice of concentration or “major.” First, unlike most governments, the U.S. government is able to exercise rather little influence over the percentages of students in the United States who choose to pursue higher education degrees in Natural Sciences and Engineering (NS&E)—those decisions are made by the students themselves and by their educational institutions. The available survey evidence suggests (see figure 7.2) that about one-third of entering freshmen have for many years been expressing the intention of majoring in a STEM field (the NS&E fields plus the social/behavioral sciences combined). This has risen to nearly 40 percent in the most recent data for 2012. If we back out the 11 percent in this group who intend to major in the social/behavior sciences, nearly 29 percent of entering freshmen in 2012 indicated an intention to major in an NS&E field.26
Figure 7.2.
Percentage entering freshmen intending STEM major, 1995–2012
Source: Historical series calculated and compiled by author from: for data from 1995 to 2010, National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, appendix table 2-12, available online at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/appendix.htm.
For 2011 data, J. H. Pryor, K. Eagan, Blake L. Palucki, S. Hurtado, J. Berdan, and M. H. Case. The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2012 Expanded Tables (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA, 2013), pp. 26–27.
For 2012 data, J. H. Pryor, L. DeAngelo, Blake L. Palucki, S. Hurtado, and S. Tran. The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2011 Expanded Tables (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA, 2012), pp. 37–38. Available online at http://heri.ucla.edu/publications-main.php.
Intentions may not determine outcomes, of course, and the second unusual characteristic of U.S. undergraduate education is the four-year “liberal arts” format that prevails for the first degree, which means that most students begin their postsecondary studies without firm commitments as to their ultimate field of concentration or “major.” Typically they are not required to make such a choice until the end of the second year of their four-year degree, although engineering is an exception in which most must declare their choice during the first year and sometimes even at the time of application for admission. This liberal arts tradition allows for much re-assortment of students among concentrations or majors during the first two years of the four-year baccalaureate degree.
To examine how much re-assortment actually takes place we must of course look at longitudinal data for student cohorts who became freshmen at least five to six years earlier so that their decisions about majors can be tracked to graduation. Two such analyses, one by the National Science Board27 (NSB) and the other by Hal Salzman,28 use somewhat different strategies to follow initial and ultimate choices of majors by new freshmen in 2004. They both find considerable “fluidity” in the paths followed by U.S. freshmen, and far more than in most other countries.
The NSB data show that overall about 236,000 of 1,388,000 entering freshmen in 2004 had selected an NS&E field29 as their major (about 17 percent of the total), but by 2009 about 80,000 of these 236,000 (about one-third overall, but with varying percentages across NS&E fields) had shifted out to non-NS&E majors. Much larger numbers of entering freshmen reported initial choices of non-NS&E majors (652,000, or about half) or were “missing/undeclared” (392,000 or 28 percent). Of these, more than 100,000 had shifted into NS&E fields by 2009, but most had selected majors outside of NS&E fields. This re-sorting of freshmen majors resulted in a net inflow into NS&E majors on the order of 20,000–25,00030 between 2004 and 2009.
Salzman’s more detailed analyses, which use a slightly different definition of “science and engineering,”31 found that about 69,000 entering freshmen in 2004 had left the NS&E majors that they initially declared, while about 81,000 had entered these majors and graduated—again suggesting a small net increase, in this case of about 12,000.32 Salzman concludes that this fluid process of choice of specialization or major in U.S. undergraduate education can best be characterized by the metaphor of “pathways” rather than by the popular usage of the more unidirectional metaphor of a “pipeline,” or more often a “leaking pipeline.” He also suggests that it may actually be this “loose coupling between S&E disciplines and S&E careers that provides the U.S. some of its dynamism, innovativeness, and creativity.”33
This U.S. structure is quite different from bachelor’s degrees in most other countries, both developed and developing, which provide a three-year degree characterized by strong specialization from the very beginning and limited opportunities for students to shift to other fields. Moreover, in many such countries the university system is financed largely by the government, and government agencies have considerable influence on the distribution of specializations pursued by university students.
Comparable population data are not yet available from the census rounds of 2010/2011, but other evidence suggests that the absolute number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in natural sciences and engineering have been relatively flat in most countries during the past decade, but has expanded greatly in China (see figure 7.1). According to one of the more authoritative sources, of the more than 3 million first university degrees awarded globally in NS&E around 2008 (an incomplete count including only locations for which fairly recent data are available), China’s percentage had expanded very rapidly to account for nearly one-third of the world total, representing just over 1 million such degrees.34
It is however easy to misinterpret such information. The real story about first university degrees in natural science and engineering in countries such as Singapore, China, and South Korea actually is about engineering. While all of these countries do report very high percentages of first degrees in the natural sciences and engineering (about 46 percent, 44 percent, and 37 percent respectively), these high percentages are driven mainly by their exceptionally high percentages of degrees in engineering rather than natural science. Indeed, as noted earlier engineering degrees alone comprise about 34 percent, 31 percent, and 25 percent of all first university degrees in Singapore, China, and South Korea respectively.35
The Special Case of the PhD
As previously noted, in 1970 about half of the world’s PhDs in science and engineering were awarded by U.S. universities. This percentage remained very high until the turn of the twenty-first century, when China began a concerted initiative to rapidly expand the number of Chinese universities and the production of PhD degrees awarded in China. The results can be seen clearly in figure 7.3.
Over this same period, the number of NS&E doctoral degrees in the United States, which had risen slightly in the 1990s, first declined slightly in the early years of the twenty-first century and then rose substantially up to 2008—the latter increase attributable in large part to increased numbers of U.S. PhDs awarded to foreign students, primarily those from several Asian countries including China that produce high percentages of their undergraduate degrees in these fields. There also were increases in PhD production in countries such as Japan, UK, South Korea, and India, though not in Germany.
Natural sciences and engineering doctoral degrees, by selected country: 2000–2008.
Source: National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, p. 2-35, fig. 2-28.
Still, the obvious outlier in this graph is China, where the number of NS&E PhD degrees awarded rose rapidly during the 1990s, accelerated to a steeply rising curve beginning around 2001, and grew larger than the still-rising U.S. number somewhere around 2007. As is also the case for engineering degrees, there is considerable uncertainty as to the comparability of Chinese PhDs in terms of intensity and quality. Unlike the stellar performance of U.S. universities in the internationally comparative rankings of universities (see discussion in chapter 6), only a few Chinese universities yet rank among the world’s top fifty or even the top one hundred. The rankings produced by The Times (London) Higher Education Supplement for 2011–2012 include no Chinese universities among the leading fifty in the physical sciences and in the life sciences, and only four among the top fifty in engineering (of which two are in Hong Kong).36 The rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University37 show only one Chinese university (Peking) among the top one hundred in the natural sciences and mathematics. The same is true for engineering, and no Chinese universities appear in the top one hundred in this source’s rankings in the life sciences.
Nonetheless, the heavy funding and rapid expansion of Chinese higher education suggest that over time more Chinese universities will begin to be ranked among global leaders. The rapid expansion of Chinese higher education also has produced insufficiencies in the number of high-quality faculty members. National and provincial governments in China are energetically recruiting additional faculty from abroad, offering attractive inducements to nationals of other countries as well as to Chinese nationals who earned their higher degrees abroad and chose to stay on in those countries. Over time such recruitment should lead to rising quality standards of PhD programs, and if the recent remarkable expansion of Chinese undergraduate education continues, the rapidly growing numbers of recent PhDs from Chinese universities are likely to experience attractive career opportunities.
Previously, in the 1990s, and of course at a much smaller scale, the government of Japan also decided to sharply increase the number of NS&E PhDs and postdocs in Japanese universities. It appears however that the policy was not carefully related to demand for PhDs in Japan. According to an article in Nature magazine in 2011:
Of all the countries in which to graduate with a science PhD, Japan is arguably one of the worst. In the 1990s, the government set a policy to triple the number of postdocs to 10,000, and stepped up PhD recruitment to meet that goal. The policy was meant to bring Japan’s science capacity up to match that of the West—but is now much criticized because, although it quickly succeeded, it gave little thought to where all those postdocs were going to end up….
Academia didn’t want them: the number of 18-year-olds entering higher education has been dropping, so universities don’t need the staff. Neither does Japanese industry, which has traditionally preferred young, fresh bachelor’s graduates who can be trained on the job. The science and education ministry couldn’t even sell them off when, in 2009, it started offering companies around Y4 million (US$47,000) each to take on some of the country’s 18,000 unemployed postdoctoral students …
This means there are few jobs for the current crop of PhDs.38
Drivers of Trends
Much concern has been expressed that the postwar U.S. domination of global R&D and higher education in science and engineering has been waning. The quantitative evidence available does indeed suggest that growth in these areas has been more rapid in Europe and in Asia than in the United States over the past two decades. One way to think about this is that as Europe prospered under the umbrella of the European Community and later European Union, both higher education and R&D began to recover from the many disasters that afflicted them during the first half of the twentieth century. Over the same period, and particularly beginning during the 1990s, very large Asian countries such as China and India have broken the bonds of ideology or government economic control that previously had led to decades of slow economic growth and even stagnation. In some cases, especially in China over the past decade, there have been truly spectacular rates of expansion in higher education, albeit admittedly from a very low base. It remains to be seen whether these degrees will prove to be of high quality, and whether those who have earned them will find attractive careers paths.
Summary: The Glass Half-Full, or Half-Empty?
The United States continues to be the world leader both in R&D and in higher education in science and engineering. However, the globally predominant roles it held in these spheres for several decades following World War II, challenged only by the former Soviet Union in some fields, have begun to wane as other prosperous and rapidly growing countries have begun to catch up. This is especially true for China, although rapid expansion in that country is taking place from a very low base. The long-term consequences of this shift for comparative levels of innovation, economic growth, and political influence remain to be seen, and there is much concern about some of the symptoms of malaise in the current U.S. system.
In the final chapter, we turn to discussion of how the U.S. system supporting science and engineering research and education, so successful for so many decades, may be in the process of veering badly off track, and offer some suggestions of mid-course corrections that might be worthy of consideration.