"The Labor Department projects that by 2014 there will be more than 2 million job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans graduating with degrees in those subjects is plummeting." – The Economist, April 12, 2008
Corporate America has a business interest in creating more homegrown engineers, amid growing evidence of an impending shortage. In the U.S., 62 percent of doctoral degrees in engineering went to foreign nationals in 2006, compared with 50 percent in 2000, according to a recent report from the American Society for Engineering Education.
It took slightly less than a decade for the U.S. trade balance in high-technology manufactured goods to shift from a positive $40 billion in 1990 to a negative $50 billion in 2001.
In
BusinessWeek’s ranking of world information technology companies, only one of the top 10 is based in the U.S.Only one of the 25 largest initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock in 2006 took place on American exchanges. IPOs in Europe surpassed those in America – in both number and dollar volume.
Nearly 60 percent of patents filed with the U.S. Patent Office in information technology now originate in Asia.
The U.S. share of the world’s leading-edge semi-conductor manufacturing capacity dropped from 36 percent to 11 percent in the past seven years.
