“The sky is not falling, nothing horrible is going to happen today,” said Jackson, a physicist by training who chooses her words carefully. “The U.S. is still the leading engine for innovation in the world. It has the best graduate programs, the best scientific infrastructure, and the capital markets to exploit it. But there is a quiet crisis in U.S. science and technology that we have to wake up to. The U.S. today is in a truly global environment, and those competitor countries are not only wide awake, they are running a marathon while we are running sprints. If left unchecked, this could challenge our preeminence and capacity to innovate.”
And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services, and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. It was American innovators who started Google, Intel, HP, Dell, Microsoft, and Cisco, and it matters where innovation happens. The fact that all these companies are headquartered in America means that most of the high-paying jobs are here, even if these companies outsource or offshore some functions. The executives, the department heads, the sales force, and the senior researchers are all located in the cities where the innovation happened. And their jobs create more jobs. The shrinking of the pool of young people with the knowledge skills to innovate won't shrink our standard of living overnight. It will be felt only in fifteen or twenty years, when we discover we have a critical shortage of scientists and engineers capable of doing innovation or even just high-value-added technology work. Then this won't be a quiet crisis anymore, said Jackson, “it will be the real McCoy.”
Shirley Ann Jackson knows of what she speaks, because her career exemplifies as well as anyone's both why America thrived so much in the past fifty years and why it won't automatically do the same in the next fifty. An African-American woman, Jackson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1946. She started kindergarten in a segregated public school but was one of the first public school students to benefit from desegregation, as a result of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Just when she was getting a chance to go to a better school, the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, and the U.S. government became obsessed with educating young people to become scientists and engineers, a trend that was intensified by John F. Kennedy's commitment to a manned space program. When Kennedy spoke about putting a man on the moon, Shirley Ann Jackson was one of the millions of American young people who were listening. His words, she recalled, “inspired, assisted, and launched many of my generation into science, engineering and mathematics,” and the breakthroughs and inventions they spawned went well beyond the space program. “The space race was really a science race,” she said.
Thanks in part to desegregation, both Jackson's inspiration and intellect were recognized early, and she ultimately became the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from MIT (her degree was in theoretical elementary particle physics). From there, she spent many years working for AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1995 was appointed by President Clinton to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
As the years went by, though, Jackson began to notice that fewer and fewer young Americans were captivated by national challenges like the race to the moon, or felt the allure of math, science, and engineering. In universities, she noted, graduate enrollment in science and engineering programs, having grown for decades, peaked in 1993, and despite some recent progress, it remains today below the level of a decade ago. So the science and engineering generations that followed Jackson's got smaller and smaller relative to our needs. By the time Jackson took the job as Rensselaer Polytechnic's president to put her heart and soul into reinvig-orating American science and engineering, she realized, she said, that a “perfect storm” was brewing-one that posed a real long-term danger to America's economic health-and she started speaking out about it whenever she could.