At one of the renowned Indian Institutes of Technology, we recently asked a class of 80 engineering and science undergraduates how many wanted to go to the United States for graduate school or a job. A decade ago nearly everyone in the classroom would have a hand in the air. Now, not a single hand was raised. “Why go to the U.S.,” they asked, “when all the opportunity is in India?”
In China when we visited software, telecommunications, and heavy-equipment companies owned by U.S. multinational corporations, we met managers born and raised in Asia but with U.S. engineering degrees. They had expected to spend their entire working lives in the United States. So why had they gone back to China? Because these days not only were the new career opportunities there as good as those in the U.S., but the technology-development projects were even more challenging.
Clearly the U.S. is no longer the universally preferred home for the global technology elite. Increasing numbers of scientists and engineers who were educated and have built successful careers here are returning to China, India, and other countries. Many in the younger generation never come here in the first place.
Noting these trends, the policy and technology communities are sounding the alarm about an impending U.S. fall from scientific and technological dominance. Compounding the loss of international talent, they say, is the declining appeal of science and engineering for American students, even as the tide of engineers and scientists trained in China and India rises. Recent policy reports and popular press stories claim that each of these countries is graduating around 600,000 engineers a year, compared to about 100,000 in the United States.
—Leonard Lynn is a professor of management policy at Case Western Reserve University, where he specializes in research on technology policy and management. Harold Salzman is a sociologist and senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on labor markets, workplace restructuring, skill requirements, and globalization of innovation, engineering, and technology design. Over the past five years, Lynn and Salzman have led several multinational teams in a series of projects looking at the impacts of the globalization of technology on emerging and first-world economies, multinational enterprises, entrepreneurs, and education systems. The authors retain the copyright for this article.
