Educational Space Race

There was an interesting article recently by Steve Mills in the San Jose Mercury News. He starts out quoting Friedman: ``the generation of scientists and engineers who were motivated to go into science by the threat of Sputnik in 1957 and the inspiration of JFK are reaching their retirement age and are not being replaced” And he cites the prediction of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Standards that software development and engineering will be among the Top 10 fastest-growing occupations through 2012. However, “According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, the nationwide percentage of incoming college freshmen who want to major in computer sciences declined by more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than peak levels in the early 1980s. The proportion of freshmen women who showed interest in computer sciences as a major has fallen to levels unseen since the early 1970s.”

Again, world flattening forces pose both a challenge and a significant opportunity for the U.S. and other post-industrial economies. But, are we prepared top use flat-world educational technologies to maintain future competitive advantage?