Nexus: Chapman's Journal of Law and Public Policy

For the majority of the twentieth century, the United States took pride in having the best-educated workforce in the industrialized world. Over the past 30 years, however, its dominance as the center for a highly educated workforce has steadily declined. Thirty years ago, the United States maintained 30 percent of the world’s college-educated population. At present, the United States has less than 14 percent of the world’s college students.

Not only are many industrialized nations, such as India and China, besting Americans in the percentage of college-educated individuals placed into the workforce, but those countries are also outdoing the United States in offering a quality education. Americans consistently place in the bottom half of all three continuing comparative studies of achievement in mathematics, science, and general literacy in the advanced industrial nations.

To further frustrate the United States declining position, American citizens generally expect to be paid more money than a foreign educated individual. For example, the average American engineer earns around 6 times more money than the average Indian engineer with similar credentials. With the advance of the deconstruction of corporate vertical integration and relative ease of outsourcing, how can the average undereducated American worker expect to compete against a cheap and better-educated global workforce?

One answer seemed to lie in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This Act provided nearly $98 billion in funding for improving education, of which over $67 billion has already been paid out. Recently, the Obama administration stated that of the 640,239 jobs recipients of stimulus money claimed to have created or saved, 325,000 were in education. Most were teachers’ jobs that were saved at a time when states desperately needed money to avert massive layoffs.

While it’s safe to say the United States’ doling out of never-before-seen funding has averted imminent disaster in the education sector, the nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package has yet to prove that it will do anything more than preserve the ho-hum status quo, let alone save the United States from a long-term economic washout. To compete with the rest of the world, the United States needs to drastically reform its education system. Yet, it is hard to imagine such a dynamic upgrade of a throttling education system when tens of billions of dollars are currently being spent simply to avoid calamity.

http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/leg/recovery/index.html http://www.skillscommission.org/pdf/exec_sum/ToughChoices_EXECSUM.pdf http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget10/summary/appendix1.pdf