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Broadband/Wireless – Korea, Finland, Israel (take your pick!); High Speed Transport – France; Organic Farming – Sweden; Environmental Management – Costa
Rica; Stem Cell Research – Canada; “Positive Aging” technologies and products – New Zealand; Building/Construction supplies – Mexico… why, in 2007, India’s Bollywood produced 1,200 movies in 26 different languages – think they’re not moving aggressively into the world market? Hello, Hollywood!
Against this onslaught, here’s the sober truth about how well prepared American youth – and to be fair, our society in general – are:
- High School Science and Math scores rank us 29th and 35th, respectively, amongst the world’s 57 industrialized countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This is a significant drop from as late as 2000. Furthermore, don’t look for this trend to reverse itself in the next few years – China and India are graduating 25-30% more engineering, IT and science majors each year. Our growth rate? Flat. And foreign students make up over 70% of masters-level programs in engineering, sciences and IT fields.
- 50% of American young adults aged 18-24 cannot find New York City on a map. Don’t believe it? Check out the statistically-valid 2006 National Geographic/Ropers survey. By the way, 70% couldn’t find Louisiana – after Hurricane Katrina – 63% couldn’t find Iraq, and 10% couldn’t even find the USA…(but to be fair, 70% did know what city the crime thriller “CSI Miami” takes place in…)
- America’s share of worldwide patents has decline to about 40% - it was approximately 60% in the early 1980’s.
To top it all off, “they” – our aggressive friends, neighbors/competitors – know a lot more about us than we do about them (that’s the downside of our overpowering media and entertainment presence on the world scene).
In other words …at the same time “they” are getting more aggressive and competent, we’re (relatively) going backwards. Consider an analogy from the sports world: Not only has the other team stolen our playbook, our team can’t even find its way down to the playing field…
North American ingenuity, optimism and financial muscle have been the envy of the world for many years. And truth be told, there are vast opportunities for us to potentially dominate many powerful emerging industries. Yet, our ability to exploit these and continue being a leader (or the leader) – a “superpower” – is highly dependent upon the degree to which our young employees-in-grooming become aware, informed, and connected to the shrinking global community
