Brainpower Outage

As incredible as it may seem, Daniel Goldin, the head of NASA, is having trouble recruiting young people into the glamorous U.S. space program. NASA has twice as many employees over 60 as under 30, and as Goldin said at a Times editorial board meeting last week, the graying of the agency’s work force was at least partly to blame for the failure of two NASA missions in 1999, the $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter and the $165-million Mars Polar Lander. As Goldin explained, “many of our veteran scientists and engineers had retired and weren’t available to train or mentor the few young people we could find to replace them.”

Space science is just one of the many high-tech sectors in the U.S. economy that are now suffering from a brain drain. The number of U.S. graduates in computer science and engineering is at a 17-year low, and today, even after the bursting of the high-tech investment bubble earlier this year, nearly 800,000 jobs in the industry go unfilled.

Last year Gov. Gray Davis took a first step toward increasing students’ early exposure to a bread-and-butter skill of hard science, signing a bill by Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) that created intensive Algebra Instruction Academies throughout the state by giving money to school districts and charter schools that provide algebra instruction to seventh-and eighth-graders.

Much more remains to be done. The Legislature should revive AB 912, by Assemblyman Herb Wesson (D-Culver City), a bill scuttled earlier this year that would have given grants to help school districts and charter schools increase the interest of “at-risk youth” in math and science. Studies show that minority Americans make up 24% of the population but only 3% of its hard-core engineering and science work force.

It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to grasp business leaders’ growing concern: Unless America’s public schools push their math and science courses into the 21st century, America’s technological advantage will soon flame out.