Saturday October 30, 1999

Foreign-born students who avoided weak U.S. curricula doing the best

Among the many clever and misleading defenses of our failing educational
system is the assertion that our universities are among the highest rated
in the world and Americans consistently win a disproportionate number of
Nobel Prizes. Both these claims are accurate and irrelevant.
While Americans won the lion's share of Nobel Prizes again this year, not
one of these winners was actually born in the United States. If people born
and raised elsewhere choose to come here and use their talents, fine. But
do not claim their achievements as some vindication of the American
educational system.

On the contrary, the painful question must be faced: Why were a quarter of
a billion native-born Americans unable to win a single Nobel Prize this
year, when a relative handful of naturalized Americans won so many? This is
not a vindication but an indictment of our educational system.
The top-rated American universities owe much to the generosity of American
donors and the largess of the American government, which enable
them to attract top scholars from around the world. It is research, rather
than teaching, which determines world rankings, and our well-financed Ph.D.
granting universities are unquestionably among the best at research.
However, when you look at who gets degrees in what, again the picture is
very disturbing as regards the track record of the schools and colleges
that prepare students to enter these top-rated institutions.
Less than half the Ph.D.s in engineering and mathematics awarded by
American universities are received by Americans.
Even more revealing, there is a systematic relationship between the
difficulty of the subject and the percentage of American doctorates which
go to Americans.

In a mushy and undemanding field like education, more than four out of
five of the doctorates go to Americans. It is when you start getting into
the physical sciences that the proportion drops to barely half and when you
get into engineering and math that Americans become a minority among
American university Ph.D.s.

Yes, our top universities are the cream of the crop. They are so good that
people educated in American schools and colleges cannot hold their own with
foreign students who go there.

The period during which American public schools have had declining test
scores has coincided with the period during which Americans were
increasingly displaced by foreigners in the graduate programs of some of
our top universities. In every field surveyed by the Council of Graduate
Schools, the proportion of graduate degrees in the United States going to
Americans has declined over a period of two decades, with the worst
declines being in the more demanding subjects.

A closer look at those Americans who do still hold their own in difficult
fields is also revealing. Nearly 22 percent of all Ph.D.s in engineering
received by Americans are received by Asian Americans. Here is the group
that is most out of step with the prevailing easy-going education, with its
emphasis on "self-esteem" and other
mushy fads. Again, this is not a vindication but an indictment of what is
being done in our public schools.

Ironically, people who go ballistic when minorities are
"under-represented," relative to their percentage of the population,
whether among college degree recipients or in various professions, remain
strangely silent when the whole American population is under-represented
among those receiving postgraduate degrees in science, math and engineering
in their own country.

Such under-representation might be understandable if the United States were
some Third World country just entering the world of modern science and
technology. It is staggering in a country whose people led the world in
such things in the recent past. Clearly something has gone very wrong in
our educational system.

Our current world leadership in science and technology, like our leadership
in Nobel Prizes, owes much to people who never went through the dumbed-down
education in American schools and colleges. Many come from countries which
spend far less per pupil than we do but get far better results for their
money.

What do you think? Write Thomas
Sowell, Creators Syndicate, 5777 W
Century Blvd., Suite 700 Los Angeles,
CA 90045.