That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can

by Thomas L. Friedman

  The AP story noted that this was the first time the U.S. Army had released such test data publicly. Tom Loveless, an education expert at the Brookings Institution think tank, was quoted saying the results echo those on other tests. In 2009, 26 percent of seniors performed below the basic reading level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Other tests, like the SAT, look at students who are going to college. “A lot of people make the charge that in this era of accountability and standardized testing, we’ve put too much emphasis on basic skills,” Loveless said. “This study really refutes that. We have a lot of kids that graduate from high school who have not mastered basic skills.”

  In chapter 6, we cited the unimpressive showing of American fifteen-year-olds in the international PISA test, which measures student skills in reading, math, science, and critical thinking. But many other warning signs that America’s education system was underperforming at all levels showed up in the Terrible Twos.

  In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations (October 19, 2010), Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, issued his own report card on the status of American education. On a broad set of metrics of educational attainment, we didn’t do well.

  Just one generation ago, the United States had the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. Today, in eight other nations, including South Korea, young adults are more likely to have college degrees than in the U.S. In South Korea, 58 percent of young adults have earned at least an associate’s degree. In America, just 42 percent of young adults have achieved the same milestone. In many other developed countries, the proportion of young adults with associate’s or bachelor’s degrees soared in the last 15 years. Here in the United States, we simply flat-lined. We stagnated, we lost our way—and others literally passed us by … Just as troubling, about one in four high school students—25 percent—in the U.S. drops out or fails to graduate on time. That’s almost one million students leaving our schools for the streets each year. That is economically unsustainable and morally unacceptable. High school dropouts today are basically condemned to poverty and social failure. One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals that included General Wesley Clark and Major General James Kelley. They were deeply troubled, as I am, by the national security burden created by America’s underperforming education system. Here was the stunning figure cited in the generals’ report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit. So, to borrow a phrase from the space race era—yes, Houston, we have a problem.

  In a follow-up essay in Foreign Affairs (November–December 2010), Duncan added that young Americans today have almost identical college completion rates as their parents. In other words, we’ve made no improvement. The numbers tell the story.

  “Currently,” Duncan wrote, “about one-fourth of ninth graders fail to graduate high school within four years. Among the OECD countries, only Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and New Zealand have higher dropout rates than the United States.” The numbers do not improve as American students move through the educational system.

  College entrance exams suggest that merely one quarter of graduating high school seniors are ready for college, and 40 percent of incoming freshmen at community colleges have to take at least one remedial class during their first semester. In June, the Center on Education and the Workforce projected that by 2018, the U.S. economy will need about 22 million more college-educated workers, but that, at current graduation rates, it will be short by at least three million. With not enough Americans completing college, the center warned, the United States is “on a collision course with the future.”

  American colleges and universities, Duncan added, still have one of the highest enrollment rates in the world—“nearly 70 percent of U.S. high school graduates enroll in college within one year of earning their diplomas. But only about 60 percent of students who enroll in four-year bachelor’s programs graduate within six years, and only about 20 percent of students who enroll in two-year community colleges graduate within three years.”

  Much of what Duncan described is taking place in middle-class communities, but the picture that emerges from more challenged areas is breathtakingly bleak. A May 2011 study by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund found that 47 percent of adult Detroit residents, or about 200,000 people, are functionally illiterate—which means that nearly half the adults in the city can’t perform simple tasks such as reading an instruction book, reading labels on packages or machinery, or filling out a job application. Depressingly, about 100,000 of those functionally illiterate adults have either a high school diploma or the GED equivalent. You can stimulate the Detroit economy all you want, but even if jobs come back, people who can’t read won’t be able to do them.

  We as a country already pay staggering sums to fund remedial education for students who enter the workplace with high school and college degrees—degrees that were supposed to prepare them for jobs but did not. A 2004 study of 120 American corporations by the National Commission on Writing (a panel established by the College Board) concluded that a third of the employees in the nation’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. The New York Times’s education writer, Sam Dillon, reported (December 7, 2004) that

  R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing [in Illinois], received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student: “i need help,” said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. “i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you.” … “E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited,” Dr. Hogan said.

  On education, in short, we have not updated our formula for greatness the way we did when we made sure that every American had access to a tuition-free high school education. “We have not made an equivalent commitment to the twenty-first century—to say everyone should be able to get postsecondary schooling free of tuition,” said Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist. Just when we needed to speed up, we stayed where we were. Katz quoted a telling, discouraging statistic: “American fifty-five-year-olds are still the most educated people in their cohort in the world. But American twenty-five-year-olds are in the middle of the pack. That,” he added, “is a new phenomenon.”

  Bridges

  If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who had lost World War II. When you ride from New York to Washington on the Amtrak Acela, America’s bad imitation of a Japanese bullet train, trying to have any kind of sustained cell-phone conversation is an adventure, to say the least. Your conversation can easily be aborted three or four times in a fifteen-minute span. Whenever, we, the authors, have a cell-phone conversation from the Acela, one of us typically begins by saying, “Speak fast, I’m not calling from China. I’m on the Acela.” Our airports? Some of them would probably qualify as historic monuments. We would nominate both Los Angeles International and several terminals at John F. Kennedy in New York for this distinction. LAX’s dingy, cramped United Airlines domestic terminal feels like a faded 1970s movie star who once was considered hip but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. But in many ways, LAX, JFK, and Penn Station are us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. (China, by contrast, is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification.)

  In the Terrible Twos, our roads got more crowded, our bridges got creakier, our water systems got leakier, and the lines in our airports got longer. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,
and gave America an overall grade of D. The report also gave individual grades to fifteen infrastructure categories. None got higher than C+. “Decades of underfunding and inattention have endangered the nation’s infrastructure,” the engineers said, adding that since the ASCE’s last report card in 2005, there has been little change in the condition of America’s roads, bridges, drinking-water systems, and other public works, but the cost of repairing them (when they do get repaired) has risen. ASCE estimated in 2009 that America’s infrastructure needed $2.2 trillion in repairs—up from the $1.6 trillion price tag in 2005.

  “In 2009, all signs point to an infrastructure that is poorly maintained, unable to meet current and future demands, and in some cases, unsafe,” the engineers said. A story on the Environment News Service (January 28, 2009) about the infrastructure study noted that the engineers gave “solid waste management the highest grade, a C+. The condition of the nation’s bridges receives the next highest grade, a C, while two categories, rail as well as public parks and recreation scored a C–. All other infrastructure categories were graded D or D–, including: aviation, dams, hazardous waste, inland waterways, levees, roads, schools, transit and wastewater.”

  The condition of American infrastructure is even worse than the report suggests. “The U.S. government defines 18 of America’s infrastructures as ‘critical’ to the nation,” wrote Mark Gerencser in an article entitled “Re-imagining Infrastructure” in The American Interest (March–April 2011). “Of the 18 categories, three are basic, underlying ‘lifeline’ infrastructures: energy, transportation and water. As it happens, all three are beyond mature; they are nearing the end of their useful operating lives and are in desperate need of recapitalization and modernization to accommodate both new needs and the increased demands of our population growth.” The ASCE report quoted Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell as saying, “The longer we wait the more expensive it will be … This is as urgent an imperative as health care.” We have already waited too long—we’ve let things slide for two full decades. The price for making a comeback, for becoming again the people and the country we used to be, is only mounting.

  Brain Drain

  In March 2010, a large gala dinner was held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.—black ties, long dresses. But this was no ordinary dinner. There were forty guests of honor. So here’s our brainteaser for readers: We will give you the names of most of the honorees, and you tell us what dinner they were attending. Ready?

  Linda Zhou, Alice Wei Zhao, Lori Ying, Angela Yu-Yun Yeung, Lynnelle Lin Ye, Kevin Young Xu, Benjamen Chang Sun, Jane Yoonhae Suh, Katheryn Cheng Shi, Sunanda Sharma, Sarine Gayaneh Shahmirian, Arjun Ranganath Puranik, Raman Venkat Nelakanti, Akhil Mathew, Paul Masih Das, David Chienyun Liu, Elisa Bisi Lin, Yifan Li, Lanair Amaad Lett, Ruoyi Jiang, Otana Agape Jakpor, Peter Danming Hu, Yale Wang Fan, Yuval Yaacov Calev, Levent Alpoge, John Vincenzo Capodilupo, and Namrata Anand.

  Sorry, wrong, it was not a dinner of the China-India Friendship Association. Give up? All these honorees were American high school students. They were the vast majority of the forty finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. As the list of names makes clear, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.

  If you need any convincing about the virtues of immigration, attend the Intel science finals. We need to keep a constant flow of legal immigrants into our country, whether they wear blue collars or lab coats. It is a part of our formula that very few countries can copy. When all of these energetic, high-aspiring people are mixed together with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens. If we want to keep that magic, we need immigration reform that guarantees that we will always attract and retain, in a legal, orderly fashion, the world’s first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices.

  The overall winner of the 2010 Intel contest—a $100,000 award for the best project out of the forty—was Erika Alden DeBenedictis of New Mexico, who developed a software navigation system that would enable spacecraft to “travel through the solar system” more efficiently. To close the evening, Alice Wei Zhao of North High School in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was chosen by her fellow finalists to speak for them. She told the audience: “Don’t sweat about the problems our generation will have to deal with. Believe me, our future is in good hands.”

  We are sure she is right, as long as America doesn’t shut its doors—but that is exactly what it is doing. In the past, the country overcame its shortages in science and engineering talent by importing it. That practice is unfortunately becoming more difficult and less common.

  A comment by Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-born scholar of this subject, makes the point pithily: “America is suffering the first brain drain in its history and doesn’t know it.” Wadhwa, an entrepreneur himself, and a senior research associate at the Labor & Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School and an executive in residence at Duke University, has overseen a number of studies on the connection between immigration and innovation. They all show that it is vital to America’s future to nurture that connection and to strengthen our attraction for talent because so many other countries are now strengthening theirs.

  “As the debate over the role of highly skilled immigrants intensifies in the U.S., we’re losing sight of an important fact: America is no longer the only land of opportunity for these foreign-born workers,” Wadhwa noted in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (March 5, 2009).

  There’s another, increasingly promising, destination: home. New research shows that many immigrants have returned to their native countries—especially India and China—to enjoy what they see as a better quality of life, better career prospects, and the comfort of nearby family and friends. The trend has accelerated in the past few years, in part because these workers have also lost patience with the U.S. visa backlog. At the end of 2006, more than a million professionals and their families were in line for the yearly allotment of just 120,000 permanentresident visas. The wait time for some has been longer than 10 years.

  All this matters, Wadhwa writes, “because immigrants are critical to our long-term economic health. Although they represent just 12% of the U.S. population, they have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s tech companies and contributed to more than 25% of U.S. global patents. They make up 24% of science and engineering workers with bachelor’s degrees and 47% of those with Ph.D.s.” He and two colleagues conducted a survey of 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants to the United States who had returned to their home countries. The vast majority were young and highly skilled, and had earned advanced degrees. Asked why they had left, 84 percent of the Chinese and 69 percent of the Indians cited professional opportunities. For the vast majority, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element. Asked if U.S. visa issues played a role in their decisions, a third of the Indians and a fifth of the Chinese answered in the affirmative. Most of the returnees, Wadhwa said, “seem to be thriving. With demand for their skills growing in their home countries, they’re finding corporate success. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the U.S. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the U.S. to 36% in China.”

  Some opponents of reforming the visa system to attract and keep more highly skilled non-Americans have charged that giving a job to a foreigner takes a job away from a U.S. citizen. In some cases, Wadhwa noted in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article (May 4, 2009), that is true. Some companies have used H-1B visas to hire foreign labor to lower their labor costs. “But in the aggregate, the preponderance of evidence shows that the more foreigners are working in science and technology jobs in the U.S., the better off the U.S. economy is. Increasingly, the number of H-1B holders in a region correlates to increased filings of patents in that region. And for every 1% increase in immigrants with university degrees, the number of patents filed per capita goes
up 6%.”

  American immigration policy today is just “plain stupid,” concluded Peter Schuck of the Yale Law School and John Tyler, general counsel of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which studies innovation. They noted in an essay in The Wall Street Journal (May 11, 2011) that of “more than one million permanent admissions to the U.S. in 2010, fewer than 15% were admitted specifically for their employment skills. And most of those spots weren’t going to the high-skilled immigrants themselves, but to their dependents.” The H-1B program that gives a pass for high-skilled immigrants to work in America on renewable three-year visas, which can lead to permanent status, is tiny. “The current number of available visas,” they added, “is only one-third what it was in 2003.”

  It cannot be said often enough: Well-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups, which come from smart, creative, inspired risk takers. There are only two ways to get more of these people: growing more at home by improving our schools, and importing more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely we need to do both. “When you get this happy coincidence of high-IQ risk takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-IQ risk takers, you get above-average returns as a country,” argued Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft. “What is common to Singapore, Israel, and America? They were all built by high-IQ risk takers and all thrived—but only in the U.S. did it happen on a large scale and with global diversity, so you had a really rich cross-section.”