DOMESTIC: Our Edge: Best Educated Kids
As the global economy becomes more entrenched, the United States is going to find it harder to maintain its standard of living as it tries to compete. To stay ahead of our economic competitors, we must invest more in our “human resources”--that is, the children who will be the leaders of tomorrow.
During my career in the electronics industry, I have watched as production has moved first from high-paying American factories to cheaper factories of the “Asian tigers” and now to the factories in developing countries where workers will toil for dollars a day. The computer consultants my company has hired to solve our Y2K problems are from India, because they work cheaper than American programmers do.
In other words, foreign competition is eating away at an industry even as young as computer programming.
The lesson is clear: We cannot compete in the world economy on price alone because others are willing to work for far less. The only way we can remain at the top is to have something unique that people are willing to pay a premium for. That means a smarter, more creative and more innovative work force. And that will mean making sure that our students are going to schools that prepare them to score highest on international math and science tests. Currently, we score 18th among the industrialized countries of the world.
It’s hard to quantify how much we lose every year because we fail to invest enough in our kids. Yes, our best high schools and colleges continue to turn out great minds. But how many jobs were never created because someone who should be employing dozens of people at a whiz-bang Silicon Valley company is instead working behind the counter of the local fast-food place because his or her school couldn’t afford computers or there wasn’t money enough in the family for college?
We spent trillions of dollars on weapons during the Cold War to defend our way of life. In the next century, the real threats to our way of life will be economic, not military. Our government needs to react to these changing conditions. Surely we can afford to invest today in our children’s education, or tomorrow there won’t be enough well-paying jobs left in this country for them to do the same for their own children.
