During a period of intense debate over the continuation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the best way to keep America competitive in the world market, politicians would do well to turn their attention to an op-ed written by Bill Gates last year for The Washington Post.
Gates asserts that the key to America’s economic dominance rests with its power of innovation and goes on to outline the two major measures that he believes are necessary to maintain that dominance.
Both measures boil down to ensuring that intelligent individuals end up working in the United States. The first fairly straightforward and non-controversial measure is improving schools: growing more qualified innovators at home.
Easier said than done, Mr. Gates! Even with so many programs already focused on school improvement, including President Bush’s No Child Left Behind, the challenge of saving America’s ailing schools seems more Herculean every day.
However, while the president’s program focuses on ensuring teacher’s qualifications and rigorously testing results, Gates suggests that the outcomes it tests might not be the right ones.
Instead, a greater focus should be placed on “the math, science and problem-solving skills (students) need to succeed in the knowledge economy.” Priority should be given to elective classes that develop skills in computer programing and other in-demand fields. Most importantly, schools and students need to wake up to the reality of the U.S. job market and adjust accordingly.
In fact, at a time when most job markets are suffering from the current economic slowdown, job demand in the tech sector continues to outpace U.S. supply by a wide margin. Even if America magically changed public school curricula overnight, it would still be years until the innovative students it produced would be ready to join the workforce. Bill Gates’ suggestion for the interim is the second, more controversial measure outlined in the editorial.
Until we can manage to produce enough innovators on our own, we should have the ability to import them to fill the gap. Though the U.S. currently issues work visas to many qualified professionals from overseas, many more are needed, and Gates strongly endorses an expansion of the number and nature of those visas.
Ironically, though immigration has been a hot-button issue this election season, little attention has been paid to this facet of the debate. Let any politician suggest importing labor from another country, especially skilled labor, and the knee-jerk response is that they are stealing jobs away from American citizens. But in the case of tech jobs, importing labor in the short term may actually save American jobs in the future.
The fact is, as the number of jobs in “innovative” fields like computer technology has continued to rise, the number of American graduates in computer science has actually fallen. In order to maintain America’s innovative dominance, those spaces have to be filled until we can get our numbers up. Otherwise, the new crop of students Gates envisions will find that all the jobs they were promised have travelled overseas.
Education, immigration, the path to economic growth ““ these are still some of the biggest issues on the campaign trail this year. Gates has presented an innovative way of approaching all three.