The days of China as the low-cost, low-tech manufacturer of the rest of the world’s high-tech innovations may soon be coming to a close. China now leads in the production of not just low-end manufactured consumer goods but also some high-tech devices, many of which were developed in the United States. This is making it harder and harder for even our high-tech companies to create jobs and compete in lucrative export markets.

The goals President Barack Obama presented in last night’s State of the Union address for U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China are right on the mark. He acknowledged the fundamental role innovation plays in driving economic growth when he said, “In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living. … maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success.”

But the president also recognized the strides China has made in investing in their innovation-driven future. “China,” he said, is “educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies. … and China is building faster trains and newer airports.”

These statements echo the findings of our recent report, “Rising to the Challenge: A Progressive U.S. Approach to China’s Innovation and Competitiveness Policies,” and so did his conclusion. “If we want to win the future,” he said, “if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas … we need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

The president is right. Staying competitive means investing in the building blocks of an innovation-driven economy, from science and math education to university research, including partnerships with small businesses, investors, and manufacturers who create jobs by building markets for new technology. Accomplishing these goals, however, will require a well-crafted and comprehensive policy vision. As the president and the new Congress work together to build a new foundation for economic growth, here are the top 10 things they can do to ensure our world-class innovation engine continues to run smoothly.

Invest in future talent through strong science, technology, engineering, and math education programs and workforce training

Science and math expertise are critical to sustaining an innovative economy. But as the president said last night, “the quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations.” Students in China consistently score higher on standardized math and science tests. Furthermore, 59 percent of Chinese students major in fields related to science or engineering, as opposed to only 32 percent in the United States. To remedy this disparity, we need to add 10,000 new STEM teachers each year and strengthen the skills of the 250,000 current STEM teachers by implementing the programs in the president’s Educate to Innovate agenda. The president also needs to ensure that reform of No Child Left Behind includes a strong emphasis on science and math training.

Create new opportunities and improve educational quality for working learners

Only 34 percent of working learners who return to college actually complete a degree after six years of study. Creating opportunities for working learners is critical to giving them the necessary skills to be competitive in emerging fields. To keep our workforce educated and competitive, we need to build bridges from STEM education programs and academia by revising and revitalizing the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, which is up for reauthorization.

Invest in seizing the clean energy opportunity

U.S. public investment in renewable energy has fallen from $9 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1980 to $3.2 billion in 2006. Meanwhile, by some estimates, China spends as much as $12 billion monthly on new energy technologies and export expansion. Six of the top 10 global photovoltaic manufacturers are now located in China, accounting for roughly one-quarter of global production.

The United States needs to get back in the race to seize the vast economic opportunity embodied in clean energy. From cleaner air to increased energy security and price stability; to more job creation; to lower heating, lighting, and transportation bills; clean energy innovation is a win-win-win for those countries willing to invest in it.

To that end, we need to invest in a three-tiered approach of expanding markets, harnessing private financial capital, and building the infrastructure needed to seize the job-creating, economic benefits of clean energy. More concretely, we need to put a price on pollution to help clean energy become the profitable kind of energy; set a clean energy standard to signal long-term market stability to investors; and reform the outdated regulatory system that governs our aging national transmission grid so that a new and smarter grid can bring clean energy and efficiency savings to every household in the country.

Focus federal investments in technology innovation on the critical valley of death gap

Part of what China has done to help leapfrog the technological ladder is to double down in not just research and development but critical commercial activities where new technologies enter the market and wean themselves off of government funding. Programs funded by the Recovery Act of 2009, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, and the regional innovation cluster grant competition are already helping move technologies from the university to the assembly line. We need more federal attention for this kind of activity in the coming years.

Harness private capital flows toward innovative, job-creating small businesses

The pool of venture capital for innovative new technologies has decreased in recent years, making it difficult for small businesses with new technologies to grow and bring their products to market. In this financial environment, VC investors are choosing to take less and less risk in their investments, which deprives promising young technologies of the capital they need to get off the ground.

What’s more, programs such as the Small Business Innovation Research grants, Small Business Technology Transfer grants, Technology Innovation Program grants, and others are poorly coordinated to ensure maximum effectiveness of their already small program budgets. And for clean energy, we need a green bank to extend credit enhancements to financers for investments in clean energy and other technologies of national priority such as information technology and advanced manufacturing.

Policymakers need to turn their attention to how we can lure private capital toward the job-creating and innovative small businesses that drive technology commercialization and make up the backbone of our economy.

Increase our focus on domestic manufacturing capabilities

Manufacturing is an essential component of a successful innovation and competitiveness strategy. Not only do high-tech goods account for $231 billion in export earnings, or roughly a quarter of our overall manufactured exports, but manufacturing is a key element of successful technology innovation.

Unfortunately our balance of trade in high-tech manufactured goods has declined from a $60 billion surplus in 1990 to a deficit of $60 billion in recent years. To stay competitive with China we need to make the technologies we invent here, rather than letting China take all the benefits of incremental improvements and cost-reducing assembly line innovation.

As a nation, we need to commit to the manufacturing of high-end products in the United States, by strengthening federal investment in the Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program and by expanding and extending the 48C advanced energy manufacturing tax credit program to give it a long-lived lifespan and predictable sunset.

Reform immigration laws to encourage the immigration of skilled foreigners

Foreign nationals comprise two-thirds of Ph.D. students and are responsible for founding 50 percent of Silicon Valley startup companies. Yet our immigration laws make it difficult for immigrants to transition from education to work, and to move from job to job in the innovation economy, drastically reducing the potential that these skilled workers have to contribute to growth.

We need to streamline visa processing for international students, make it easier for students graduating with degrees in STEM fields to remain in the United States, make the cap on highly-skilled visas more flexible, and create easier paths to permanent residence for highly skilled workers with graduate-level degrees in these fields. We also need to ensure those undocumented immigrants raised in the United States and now in college get the chance to become citizens and contribute to the nation they call their own.

Invest in regional races to the top and clustered industry growth

Study after study shows that regional innovation clusters are an efficient means of facilitating industry collaboration and synergy. Chinese innovation and economic planners are also well aware of the importance of clustering by encouraging Chinese companies in similar industries to clump together to improve their access to incremental innovation, share supply chains, and boost the competitiveness of their workforces.

The America COMPETES Act signed by the president late last year unfortunately did not include language passed by the House of Representatives to support regional innovation cluster grant programs. We need to establish far-reaching programs like the Energy Efficiency Regional Innovation Cluster grant that align national innovation priorities with regional economic development plans. One way to do this would be for Congress to take back up the Energy Innovation Hubs Authorization Act of 2010, which would provide $860 million in grants over five years to encourage the R&D and commercialization of critical clean energy technologies.

Pass legislation to spur long-term innovation

While the America COMPETES Act is a solid stepping stone, the passage of three additional pieces of legislation is critical to bolstering the United States’ long-term innovation strategy. The Department of Energy Office of Science Authorization Act of 2010, the ARPA-E Reauthorization Act of 2010, and the Energy Innovation Hubs Authorization Act of 2010 would collectively work not only to fund additional groundbreaking research but also to find new commercial applications and help bring emerging technologies to market.

Establish metrics for competitiveness by which to measure progress, and create a coordinated interagency effort to address our innovation and competitiveness challenges

In “A Focus on Competitiveness,” CAP outlines a few mechanisms that should be put in place to help coordinate the kind of cross-cutting, multi-agency collaboration needed to implement a real innovation and competitiveness agenda. Metrics and oversight are needed to promote collaboration of otherwise uncoordinated activities across many federal agencies. To this end we suggest a Quadrennial Competitiveness Assessment, a Biannual Presidential Competitiveness Strategy report, and an Interagency Competitiveness Taskforce to point the United States in the right direction.

Conclusion

With a strong contingency of well-trained workers, the proper infrastructure for innovation, and a government dedicated to investing in research for the next great technological breakthroughs, the United States would be properly equipped to stay competitive in a future of booming growth in China and elsewhere. We can and must rethink, retool, and reinvest in our nation’s innovation potential if we are to succeed. As the president said last night, “that’s what Americans have done for over 200 years: reinvented ourselves.”

Sean Pool is a co-author (along with Kate Gordon, Susan Lyon, and Ed Paisley) of the recent report from the Center for American Progress titled “Rising to the Challenge: A Progressive U.S. Approach to China’s Innovation and Competitiveness Policies.” David Murdter is an Intern in the Online Communications department at the Center. This article is cross-posted on the Center for American Progress website.

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When Chinese president Hu Jintao alights in Washington, D.C. next week for a summit meeting with President Obama, he will learn firsthand that China is fast becoming the touchstone against which everything wrong with the U.S. economy is measured. In the run up to last year’s midterm congressional elections, candidates across the country accused one another of “sending jobs to China” instead of creating jobs at home. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle regularly promise to seek trade sanctions against China for undervaluing its currency. The United States recently accepted a United Steelworkers petition accusing China of unfairly subsidizing its exports and hoarding raw materials essential for clean energy technology development. And U.S. companies across a range of industries are increasingly voicing their complaints about China’s theft of their intellectual property and the country’s forced transfer of cutting-edge U.S. technology in exchange for access to the nation’s vast and fast-growing domestic market.

The overarching message coming from the United States is this: If China would just stop cheating, the U.S. economy would rebound, helping both nations and the rest of the world recover more sustainably from the Great Recession and sparking broad-based economic growth on both sides of the Pacific. Equally forcibly (though in more diplomatic language), President Barack Obama is expected to deliver that same message.

What this view assumes is that if only China would stop cheating, the U.S. economy would do what it has done best for the last hundred years or so—lead the world based on our prowess at science, technology, and innovation. After all, our universities are the best in the world, or entrepreneurialism is world-renowned, and our ability to turn new ideas into new job-creating products and services is unsurpassed. But this interpretation is not entirely accurate.

China is now investing in many of the building blocks of innovation-driven economic growth that the United States has all but abandoned over the past several decades. Pick your sector and you’ll find China spends more on a per capita basis, and sometimes in total amounts, on public investments in basic science and education, research and development, or R&D, infrastructure development, and workforce training. What’s more, China’s leaders have crafted coherent policies and programs in support of domestic manufacturing and services for export abroad and to ensure Chinese companies have the prime positions in China’s rapidly growing domestic economy.

China, in short, is actively and methodically building up the basic foundations for future economic growth while also ensuring a market for its current and future products and services at home and abroad. The country’s leaders understand completely the message driven home by The World Economic Forum, in its monumental Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011, which underscores the importance of innovation as the basis for long-term economic growth:

Although substantial gains can be obtained by improving institutions, building infrastructure, reducing macroeconomic instability, or improving human capital, all these factors eventually seem to run into diminishing returns. The same is true for the efficiency of the labor, financial, and goods markets. In the long run, standards of living can be enhanced only by technological innovation. Innovation is particularly important for economies as they approach the frontiers of knowledge and the possibility of integrating and adapting exogenous, [or imported,] technologies tends to disappear.

China and the United States have very different legal, political, and economic systems, but both are bound by the same reality that to be competitive in the 21st century global economy, they have to innovate. But unlike most political leaders in the United States, China’s leaders recognize that innovation is not created in a vacuum. Across the globe, developed and developing countries are realizing what economists have known for years—that technological innovation, more than any other factor, fuels long-term economic competitiveness and growth, and that innovation in turn requires a robust and well-integrated foundation of education, research, and infrastructure.

The widespread recognition of these principles has sparked a global race to the top in innovation, science, and technology policy. But judging from the state of our innovation policy, the United States seems to have missed the memo. Other nations see innovation and competitiveness as two sides of the same economic coin. And not surprisingly, as John Podesta, Sarah Wartell, and Jitinder Kohli point out in CAP’s recent report, “A Focus on Competitiveness,” “…other countries organize their economic policy apparatus more explicitly around the question of how to effectively compete.”

China in particular does this very well. In this paper, we examine the challenges posed to current and future innovation-led economic growth in the United States by China’s drive to boost innovation at home by any means available. As we will demonstrate, some of these challenges cut to the core of our nation’s own global economic and scientific strengths—even though some of China’s innovation policies and programs are plagued by inherent liabilities that are built into the country’s approach to innovation.

Some Chinese R&D spending, for example, ends up fueling academic fraud, a huge problem in China, where local scientists often try to lay claim to new discoveries that are bogus. But the spending levels are still impressive, as is the fact that China has taken pains to invest across the entire innovation chain from basic science, to R&D, to market creation for new technologies, to production and deployment of these technologies. This is paying innovation dividends in hybrid electric vehicles, advanced batteries, high-speed rail, and solar power systems, to name a few.

Indeed, one of China’s other innovation “assets” is its growing direct investment in basic research and development. In 2008, China’s gross national expenditure on research and development stood at roughly $66 billion, or about 1.5 percent of China’s gross domestic product. This is the highest investment level among developing economies as a percent of their domestic economy and ranks China fourth in the world in overall R&D spending behind the United States, Japan, and Germany.

Similarly, China’s massive domestic investments in global market-scale industries such as clean technology products, transportation, mobile telecommunications and aerospace are now enabling Chinese companies in these sectors to compete for business abroad and dominate their home market. Again, there are liabilities built into this strategy: Economists can point to costly misplaced investments in some of the infrastructure needed to get these industries off the ground—misinvestments that saddle the Chinese state-owned banking system with an entire new raft of non- performing loans and resulting in way too many empty science parks and regional industrial zones that are no more than property speculation gone awry.

This same strategy—key directed investments in science and innovation to spur rapid economic growth no matter the cost—is even evident in the Chinese government’s planning processes. China’s famous communist-era “five-year plans,” which often bore little relation to reality, are now precise blueprints for strategic market-oriented, innovation-led economic growth to spur job creation at home and exports abroad. Then as now, however, local political and business leaders in China’s provinces and cities, counties and townships continually go their own way in interpreting these plans and then spending the cash, often resulting in misleading statistical data flowing back to Beijing “proving” the metrics of the blueprint are being met while in fact the funds are being spent on a variety of other activities, including local property development and speculation.8

But these liabilities do not mean that U.S. policymakers can afford to be complacent. China’s so called “import/assimilate/re-innovate” model of technology development, for example, actively drives foreign companies to share their technologies with Chinese joint venture partners in exchange for access to the cheap Chinese workforce and burgeoning domestic marketplace. This strategy poses a direct challenge to U.S. competitiveness because it enables Chinese (often state-owned) companies to gain access to cutting-edge technologies but also build upon them incrementally to create a Chinese innovation ecosystem. Never mind that economists recognize that the downside to this model of economic development is that it delivers diminishing returns without genuine domestic innovation delivering world-class breakthroughs.

In the pages that follow we will examine China’s innovation assets and liabilities as the country races to build a globally competitive innovation-led economy, and then consider how the United States should react to these challenges. We then offer our recommendations to U.S. policymakers on steps our own government can take to ensure our nation rises to meet the challenges posed by China. Briefly, though, we will argue that the U.S. government needs to give our nation’s innovation engine a tuneup by:

• Modernizing our basic infrastructure to allow businesses to more effectively collaborate and compete in domestic and international markets
• Investing more in science and math education and workforce development to ensure we have workers able to participate in the technology-driven economy of the present and future
• Crafting finance policies to make more public and private capital available to innovators and bolster our culture of entrepreneurship by rewarding risk-taking and competitiveness
• Promoting international trade policies that ensure access to foreign markets, and the free flow of goods, services, knowledge, and capital across borders
• Honing our research and development policies so that we invest not just in basic research but also the full innovation lifecycle from invention, to development, to production and commercialization

These are progressive proposals that would boost our national competitiveness and jobs growth in the short run and ensure our once-dominant position in science and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, and job creation is not eclipsed by China in the 21st century. On the eve of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington, these are progressive proposals that Congress and the Obama administration dearly need to take to heart.

Kate Gordon is the Vice President for Energy Policy, Susan Lyon is a Special Assistant for Energy Policy, Vice President for Editorial, and Sean Pool is the Assistant Editor for Science Progress.

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View this post at the Center for American Progress Website.

Over the past 30 years the number of women receiving Ph.D.s in all the physical sciences and engineering has risen significantly, with huge advances in the life sciences, where they currently receive more than 50 percent of all Ph.D.s. Women now represent a large part of the American talent pool for research science, but many studies indicate that they are more likely than men to “leak” out of the pipeline before obtaining a tenured position at a college or university.

A recent report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences confirmed that women who receive Ph.D.s in the sciences were less likely than men to seek academic research positions—the path to cutting-edge discovery—and they were more likely to drop out before attaining tenure if they did take on a faculty post. The loss of these women, together with serious increases in European and Asian nations’ capacity for research, means the long-term dependability of a highly trained U.S. workforce and global preeminence in the sciences may be in question.

Our research at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that the leak is predominantly associated with starting a family. Across the country married women scientists with young children who have received their Ph.D.s are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure-track position than married men with young children. There is little difference in the rates of those who pursue tenure between single women without young children and men who are married with young children. A similar leak occurs at the point of granting tenure: Married women with young children are 27 percent less likely on a yearly basis to achieve this goal than married men with young children.

So what are we doing to solve this problem? Not enough. Our study considered the 62 schools that made up the Association of American Universities—the pre-eminent research institutions that receive the bulk of the federal support for science. We found that 43 percent of those schools provided no, very limited, or ad hoc leave policies for graduate student mothers and only 13 percent offered a baseline of at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave without limitations that prohibit access to that time off. For postdoctoral fellows, 15 percent of universities offered no leave or had very limited or ad hoc policies, while a mere 23 percent provided a baseline of at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave without limitations that prohibit access to it. Few of these young scientists are eligible for the job-protected 12-week unpaid leave of the Family Medical Leave Act. Faculty mothers fared somewhat better, with 58 percent of institutions providing a baseline paid leave, but before reaching this rank, many women have decided against scientific research careers.

Young women scientists see the lack of family responsive policies and often make their decisions in graduate school, before they become mothers. In our study of University of California doctoral students, both men and women indicated that they were concerned about the family friendliness of possible career paths, but research-intensive universities were considered the least family friendly of a range of possible career choices.

At a meeting in Washington, D.C. last month sponsored by the American Council on Education and Berkeley Law’s Center on Health, Economic and Family Security, leading members of the university world and the major federal granting agencies cooperated in addressing what it would take to keep more women in the pipeline. Measures already in place in many of our international competitor countries—such as paid parental leave, grants to cover the cost of childcare while researchers participate in professional conferences, and part-time and re-entry grants—could go a long way in stemming this leak.

Our current inadequate benefiting of America’s researchers makes no economic sense. In the world of federal grants, individuals who drop out of research science after years of training represent a huge economic loss. These science students are normally supported by federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to completion. The reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act should provide support for universities and federal agencies to work together on a baseline of family responsive policies for graduate students, postdoctoral academic researchers, and faculty. Doing so will help us preserve our competitive edge.

Mary Ann Mason is a Professor and Faculty Co-director of Berkeley Law School’s Center for Health, Economic and Family Security and the co-author of “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences.”

The more recent generation of women appears to be taking a different approach to planning their lives, more sensitive to the problems in maintaining a balance of work and family. In a controversial 2005 article in The New York Times, Louise Story reported anecdotal evidence that many women in elite colleges were thinking twice about combining careers and families, and there have been many other books and stories since then about women’s unhappiness in trying to do it all. This is true even in academia, which has generally been more accommodating to people with families, given the faculty’s relative autonomy and the flexibility of work hours. And the problem has been, most significantly, in the natural sciences, where the hours tend to be long and the competitive pressures unceasing throughout a person’s career.

Witness the recent report published by the Center for American Progress and the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security on “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences,” which asserts that “both men and women report a shifting away from the career goal of a research professor, with women’s moves being more pronounced.”

The report focuses its recommendations for institutions on creating more family-friendly policies, including stopping the tenure clock for bearing and caring for children, the provision of child care support and tuition remission, and even the construction of lactation rooms. There is no question that there must be a stronger institutional response of this kind before we lose a generation of American scientists, male and female. And as long as the burden of childcare and domestic life still falls mainly on women, it will be the women that we lose.

But from where I sit, as a dean who oversees the hiring and promotion of faculty across a school of arts and sciences, I see we will have to do more than provide childcare. There will have to be a change in culture in the assessment of academic productivity, which now privileges an unrelenting rate of massive amounts of work over time. Everyone recognizes that the expectations for academic productivity have escalated in the past forty years: what got you tenure in 1970 would certainly not get you tenure now, whether at an elite liberal arts college or a research university.

The CAP-Berkeley report does address the issue of time and work, for example, in its recommendation to “remove time-based criteria for fellowships and productivity assessment that do not acknowledge family events and their impact on career timing.” But what happens when people with and without such extensions are competing for jobs and tenure in the same pool? When at least some people can produce new results and publications at an exceptionally high rate, because they have no other responsibilities or demands on their time, should the same be expected of everyone?

As a dean, I am responsible for making sure that my school is hiring, tenuring, and promoting the very best faculty, who will serve the institution and their field of knowledge in multiple capacities: as scholars, teachers, and citizens over a long career. Science is hard, and it moves fast, and we do indeed want scientists who can handle the work and its pace. But we also want to have faculty who are well-adjusted and good colleagues: we want faculty, indeed, who know how to “have a life.”

I believe that having a family made me a better teacher and colleague, if only because it made me stop working every once in a while, and because it brought me to appreciate a world outside of the library, lab, and classroom. And it made me no worse a scholar. I want my daughter, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in high-energy physics, to believe that she, too, can have a family and follow the passion for science that has driven her since he was in high school. But what can I really tell her about the world she will enter in a year, as she tries to balance her work and personal life? Should she seek a post-doctoral position, or should she go on the job market?

Academic leadership needs to be clear about the signals that we send to our undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty—male and female—about what constitutes success and what we value in them as scientists but also as future colleagues and as human beings. We can do this with material support for them to be able to lead full and productive lives, but we also need to give our moral support to their personal as well as scientific dreams.

Dr. Rebecca W. Bushnell is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor, as well as a Professor of English, at the University of Pennsylvania.

When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was “when is a good time to have a baby?” For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39. “So it’s increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure,” she says. Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences,” co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline. Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between Ph.D. and tenured positions. “The leak is almost entirely, or at least due primarily to family formation,” said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

To discuss the report and the choices facing women scientists along their professional pathways, Mason, Goulden, who is Director of Data Initiatives in Academic Affairs at Berkeley, and Association of American Universities President Robert Berdahl joined Science Progress for a podcast conversation.

These decisions, influenced by the family-unfriendly policies at many research institutions, account for the fact that while women now receive more than half of the Ph.D.s in science and engineering fields, they are under-represented in comparison to men at in the faculty level of their academic fields. According to the report women comprised “63 percent and 54 percent of NIH and NSF’s predoctoral awards in 2007, respectively, but just 25 percent and 23 percent of the competitive faculty grants awarded in the same year.”

But both women and men agree that research positions at universities are the most family-unfriendly career choices among a range of options for scientists. “We have a process in which a large number of very talented scientists… are discouraged about a career in science because of some of the demands that it puts upon them,” said Berdahl.

The Obama administration has made investment in science an administration priority, and as Mason points out, losing those women scientists who are so far along the career pathway represents a significant loss of federal grant funding. Training for a young scientist from graduate school through a postdoc can total close to $500,000.

For those women who do decided to start families while moving through the career pipeline, their odds of winning tenure are significantly diminished in comparison to their male counterparts. Married women with Ph.D.s who have young children are 35 percent less likely to get a tenure-track position than men with young children. The necessary time off those mothers need for childcare responsibilities can put principal investigators in charge of research grants in tough positions. “They’re definitely caught between a rock and a hard place on this issue,” explains Goulden, “because if their researchers have children and go on leave, that results in a loss of productivity to their grant. And as it stands, for the most part, they receive no additional supplemental funding in that situation.”

So it’s the responsibility of both federal grant-making agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as research universities, to develop and share policies that remove the tension in hiring decisions for PIs and create family-friendly environments for scientists aiming for the top of their profession who also want to start families. The report suggests policies that provide responsive benefits for all classes of researchers, from graduate students up through full professors; supplemental funding to offset productivity losses when scientists go on family leave; and flexibility in the lock-step timing of the academic science career path.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

But Science Progress Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Moreno looked back over the history of science policymaking in the United States Friday at a CAP event celebrating the release of Science Next, and noted that we’ve come a long way. “Today there is virtually no debate,” he said, about the fact that the government should invest in science. But the direction of science has felt adrift, he said, and “as progressives, we can’t just be science boosters. We need to worry about where it’s going.”

That’s a question our former colleague Rick Weiss, a co-editor of the book and now the director of communications at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, indicated is central to the Obama administration. Science-based decision making now enjoys a “very high profile,” he said. Speaking specifically of the current discussions on responding to the H1N1 flu outbreak, he said “science,” and concern for public health, “is at the core of every one of those decisions.” He emphasized the commander-in-chief’s own interest in technical details. “The president wants to see the science and he wants to see the evidence,” he said.

Henry Kelly (pictured above), president of the Federation of American Scientists and a contributor to Science Next, addressed the importance of considering where science is going in light of a competitive international economy. “We’re trying to compete in a world where jobs require a high level of skill, but the United States is falling behind,” in science and technology education, he warned. Moreover, he said that the country can’t hope to slow the widening gap in social inequality without workforce improvements. Among Kelly’s suggestions is using research to develop better educational tools—an approach he wrote about in the SP article on educational video games that was the basis for his chapter in the book.

Though President J. Q. Adams might have been ahead of his time in championing federal support for basic research, later proponents could not have predicted the power of successful investments like those that formed the foundation of the Internet. And as radically as the web as changed the way  private enterprise works, Jim Turner, director of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities Energy Initiative and contributor to Science Next, argued that the government has not yet realized that the technology actually has implications for the future of federalism itself.

“Not only does the Internet change the way government works,” he said, “but it changes the relationship between federal and state government,” allowing for information sharing that can improve the quality of public services. Turner explained the idea of “public policy quality management” in the article he authored with Maryann Feldman that found its way into Science Next, drawing lessons for the work of Joseph Juran, who pioneered the manufacturing processes that first transformed the Japanese, and then the U.S. industrial sectors.

You can read Weiss and Moreno’s introduction to Science Next, “Time for Science to Reclaim Its Progressive Roots,” or order the book online.

Full video from the event is available here.

Globally, wind-powered electricity generation capacity grew 29 percent in 2008 to 121 gigawatts. The American Wind Energy Association announced last month that during 2008, a record-shattering 8,300 megawatts of wind capacity was installed in the United States (HT ClimateProgress). By comparison, China installed new facilities totaling 6,300 megawatts in the last year, but that's the fourth year in a row that it doubled national capacity.

The truth is that during the current recession, some indicators don’t quite fit this predictable narrative. For instance, the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE (Graduate Record Examination), is actually estimating that fewer students (rather than more) will take the test by the close of this year. Similarly, the Council of Graduate Schools informed me this week that based upon an informal survey of its member institutions, there’s no apparent trend in the number of student applications. Some schools were up some were down, some were flat. “We have not actually seen the pattern we would have predicted,” explained council president Debra Stewart, “either in applications, acceptances, or enrollments.”

It’s worth pausing to think about the implications of this puzzle, because today’s economic downturn comes as the United States is scrambling to remake its energy system and deploy the clean technologies necessary avert the worst effects of climate change—a project for which we’ll need plenty of well-educated scientists, engineers, and other technical workers. Whether we’ll have them, though, remains to be seen. Certainly we can’t assume that the recession, like a bolt from the blue, will be the source of their delivery.

It’s enough to trouble anyone who thinks this country needs to be producing more scientists: The free market may well have other plans.

Typically, the growth of graduate students is a “lagging indicator,” following upon a recession rather than spiking right at its beginning. In 2002, for instance, graduate student enrollments went up sharply just after the last recession ended. However, the signs this time around suggest we’re not following that trend, and the possible reasons for that departure aren’t particularly pleasing to contemplate.

Stewart, of the Council of Graduate Schools, can think of three possibilities. Perhaps, she says, the credit crunch has hit the ability of students to obtain educational loans. Perhaps public universities, struggling due to the state budget implosions occurring across the country, are cutting back on teaching assistantships (which typically hold a graduate student’s body and soul together). Or perhaps young people fear this recession is so bad that they’d better cling to whatever job they currently have, lest there not be another. It’s all speculation, Stewart cautions—her organization plans to keep monitoring the numbers as more data emerges next year. But certainly it’s enough to trouble anyone who thinks this country needs to be producing more scientists: The free market may well have other plans.

Indeed, I couldn’t help thinking about the latest graduate student numbers in the context of another finding: In 2007, the last year for which figures are currently available, the total number of science and engineering PhDs produced in this country rose for the fifth year in a row. Since 2002, it has grown from 24,608 to 31,801, nearly a 30 percent increase. This might seem a hopeful development, but it’s important to note that it’s another “free market” result: According to Stewart, it largely reflects the fact that in the late 1990s, international student enrollment in U.S. universities boomed, and now many of those people are getting their degrees. And what the market gives, the market taketh away. If people are afraid to leap to grad school during the current severe recession, maybe a decade from now we’ll see a noticeable decline in PhDs.

The point is, if we really want to improve our scientific competitiveness and ensure that we can develop low-emissions energy technologies we can then share with less-developed nations, we need a concerted government effort. We need to fully fund the America Competes Act. We need the modern equivalent of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which greatly spurred higher ed enrollments in science and engineering. We can’t just wait for it to magically happen on its own, or assume that it will emerge as a kind of silver lining from the current downturn.

My coblogger and scientific lifeline to pop culture, Sheril Kirshenbaum, likes to use a Simpsons clip to explain the meaning of higher education. Bart has just cut the ponytail off of the person seated in front of him in a movie theater, and is waving it around behind his head. “Look at me, I’m a grad student,” he says. “I’m thirty years old and I made 600 dollars last year.”

“Bart,” Marge scolds him. “Don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.”

Or have they? It may well be that individual graduate students out there, or potential graduate students, are making very rational life choices in the context of the broader economic environment that they perceive. If we want that to change, or for them to move in a particular direction, we have to take steps as a society to make it happen.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”