The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that U.S. science scores for 8th graders were stagnant and 12th grade scores declined. In math, 61% of high school seniors tested at a basic level, while only 23% performed at the proficient level.
The American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES) reports that since 1985, the number of students in undergraduate engineering programs has either declined or remained relatively static. The AAES identifies a similar trend in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering disciplines and engineering technology degrees since 1988.
To further compound the problem, too few females are going into STEM 
related careers. According to the American Society for Engineering Education, only 17.5% of the U.S. undergraduate engineering students in 2005 were women. Another study by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan found that women choose other careers partly because they don’t see engineering as a way to help others.
In a climate of poor performance in math and science tests and declining graduation rates in STEM related undergraduate degrees; the U.S. job market is demanding more STEM professionals. According to a 2004 National Science Foundation study, between the years 1980 and 2000, the number of engineering and nonacademic science jobs increased by 159%. The study also reported that in 2003, there were 1.3 million engineering and engineering technology jobs in the U.S. that lacked trained people to fill them. The federal government predicts that we will need 15 million engineers and technology workers by the year 2020.
In fact, the U.S. has been looking to other countries for scientists, engineers, and technology workers to fill the growing demand. India, China, and Germany lead the pack in providing migrant professionals to the United States. But, this is only a band-aid solution and cannot change the fact that the U.S. needs to cultivate and nurture its workforce from within.
It is true that the US has many of the top undergraduate and graduate schools, but that does little to guarantee of success to address this pressing issue.
The top performers from those excellent schools often proceed to study at some of the world’s best universities, also conveniently located here. Professors at these universities encourage the most promising to continue on for science PhDs, in preparation for careers as academic researchers. The students who take this advice hope for satisfying careers resembling those their senior professors have enjoyed, pursuing their best ideas as independent researchers, heading labs amply supported by federal funding, and enjoying job stability and comfortable upper-middle class incomes as faculty members in secure tenured positions.
But the world that nurtured today’s senior professors, with PhDs earned in four years and appointments as faculty members and lab heads in their 20s, has vanished. What the great majority of today’s young scientists find instead is a penurious decade or more working in university labs, first as graduate students and then as postdoctoral researchers earning a “trainee” wage comparable to what a new liberal arts BA graduate makes, according to G. Davis, in the article “Doctors without orders,” first published in American Scientist 93 (2005)
Their search for the faculty post essential to starting their own academic research careers overwhelmingly ends in frustration, as they futilely compete for every advertised faculty opening against hundreds of other qualified applicants—all of whom sport good degrees and lists of publications from their graduate and postdoc years. The odds that a young PhD will ever land a faculty job at any four-year institution are now less than 25 percent, and at the kind of research university where big-deal science is done, well under 15 percent, according to findings of the National Science Board.
Across the United States, therefore, professors are bemoaning the choice by many of their brightest undergraduates to eschew science graduate study in favor of medical, law, or business school. These students don’t reject science because they’re bad at math, but because they’re good at it. Anyone bright enough to get a science PhD is bright enough to run the numbers showing that an average of seven years of graduate school, followed by five or more postdoc years, followed by long odds against getting the job one was ostensibly preparing for, add up to a lousy investment.
But against this discouraging backdrop there is a bright side. For foreigners, especially those from developing countries, grad school or a postdoc in America is exceedingly enticing. Why? Because the virtually unlimited visas that universities can supply make such training an otherwise largely unobtainable ticket into the country.
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