Education Reforms Aint the Key to American Prosperity
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Our most competitive industry is our attractive social climate.

For some time now there’s been a kind of national hysteria about the loss of “American jobs” to other countries and the “hollowing out” of the economy. A general concensus seems to have emerged that the solution is to force-feed more math and science to our kids.

The underlying premise of this line of reasoning is that our continued prosperity depends on outcompeting rising Asian economies in engineering and the sciences. Without examining the validity of this premise, four decades ago we embarked on a multi-generational push to “reform our educational system.”

Even assuming that this national obsession isn’t the product of politicians milking the jobs and education issues to curry favor with powerful labor unions and parents of school-age kids, I question the presumed link between our prosperity and high math and science proficiency in our primary and secondary school kids.

A generally accepted measure of a nation’s competitiveness is the Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum. It rates competitiveness using dozens of criteria ranging from health care to the integrity of the legal system to the availability of engineers.

For 2009-2010 the GCR ranks the U.S. in 2nd place behind only Swtizerland! That belies the prolonged outcry about our deteriorating educational system and its presumed adverse impact on our competitiveness. One would assume that by now the U.S. would have slipped far below the Asian nations always mentioned as “stealing jobs from Americans”. Yet Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China are ranked, respectively, 8th, 12th, 19th and 29th — below Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Britain, Canada and Australia.

The GCR consistently put the U.S. in the No. 1 spot since 1979 when it began publishing. The U.S. was dropped to 2nd place this year after it became the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. That drop had nothing to do with our educational standards. (If anything, one might argue that the crisis was precipitated by too many overeducated minds stretching leveraging schemes beyond the limits of common sense and rationality.)

In fact, the proficiency of U.S. kids in math and science has improved steadily since 1982 and now ranks near the top among students of 26 leading industrialized countries. Only Korean kids are clearly superior in both areas. Yet the outflow of programming, engineering and research jobs to Asia has only accelerated.

So if the goal of our educational reform efforts is to keep technical and manufacturing jobs from leaving the U.S. for Asia, it’s been an abysmal failure and there’s little reason to believe it will do better in coming years.

Despite this sustained outflow of manufacturing jobs Americans continue to enjoy one of the world’s highest standards of living. According to the IMF, the World Bank and the CIA, at about $47,000 (adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP)) the U.S. ranks between 4th (World Bank) and 8th (CIA) in per capita GDP — below only a handful of small, oil-rich countries (Norway and Qatar) or uniquely situated crossroads nations (Luxembourg, Singapore). That’s more than Hong Kong ($44,000), Japan ($34,000), Taiwan ($31,000), S. Korea ($28,000) and China ($6,000).

So what’s keeping us at the top of the global economic pyramid? A bunch of 70-year-old engineers raised in bygone days when the U.S. was presumedly at the top of the educational dogpile? Hardly.

In reality what makes the U.S. truly competitive among all the nations of the world is our willingness to keep upgrading to higher value-added industries as our rapidly developing neighbors across the ocean learn to make sweaters, athletic shoes, toys, transistor radios, personal computers, cars, cell phones, jumbo jetliners and even slick movies. The fact that we’re gushing jobs at car plants and widget factories isn’t a cause for alarm so much as a reassuring reminder that we’re a dynamic society able and willing to stay ahead of the curve.

How are we replacing all that lost economic activity? By building an increasingly stable and tolerant society that continues to attract the world’s most motivated workers to do their sweating here, whether it be grad students teaching our undergrads, programmers developing next-generation software or artists dreaming up cultural innovations that keep the U.S. a highly attractive home base for the cultural elite. In turn that fuels a demand for big comfortable houses, first-rate universities (which no one fears is declining), a stable social and financial system, and all the other industries that help keep the U.S. the world’s most comfortable and secure place in which to make a home.

This steady improvement in our real living standard is made possible by the constant influx of highly motivated workers not by any increase we may hope to see in the number of native-born American students applying to engineering schools. The reality is that our society’s prevailing values and icons simply don’t motivate many kids to become mathematicians, engineers or hi-tech researchers. That kind of motivation requires early lives being told that intensive focus on study is the only ticket out of a life of economic hardship and uncertainty. Nothing will change the fact that at this stage of human civilization, that kind of motivation exists in far greater abundance in kids living across the Pacific. Or the Atlantic. Or the Rio Grande.

So let’s get real. Instead of forcing more of our kids to slog through calculus equations and biochemical reactions they won’t use in college or in their professional careers, we would be better off letting them devote more energies toward cultivating the healthy bodies, creative abilities and open-minded attitudes that will serve them well as the marketers, gatekeepers and cheerleaders attracting the world’s most motivated people to the world’s most attractive society.