Keynote: Rising Above the Gathering Storm

Friday morning’s keynote speech by Norman R. Augustine, Retired Chair & Chief Executive Officer at Lockheed Martin, started with a warning, “I need to caution you this early in the morning that part of this talk will not be uplifting -- I plan to tell it like it is.” Augustine continued, “We [are] talking about a situation that is much more fundamental, more profound, and more difficult to fix than this little financial disruption that we just suffered.”

And what did Augustine tell the audience after that warning? It is still possible to increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 mathematics and science education; and still possible to sustain and strengthen the nation's commitment to long-term basic research. As chair of the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, which created the Rising Above the Gathering Storm report almost five years ago, Augustine should know if a happy ending is still possible.

Augustine believes that if the U.S. economy is to survive, we need to produce a cadre of engineers who are the best educated, imaginative and creative innovators and entrepreneurs.

“Only four percent of the workforce is scientists and engineers…but that four percent creates jobs for the other 96 percent. That’s why you should be concerned about science and engineering in this country,” said Augustine.

However, Augustine cautioned, the citizens who take the jobs created by science and engineering need to have the tools to operate in a high-tech world, which could be difficult given that today’s youngest generation is the first to be less educated than their parents.

At the time the Gathering Storm report was prepared, the K-12 system was performing abysmal and today Augustine says it’s still performing abysmal by international standards. While there are some outstanding schools and outstanding teachers, by international standards, we aren’t even competitive on average, he said.

While Augustine admitted that the K-12 problem is not a lack of tax payers to support our students, he did say that we need to make funding in the areas of science and engineering a lasting budget action not just stimulus-based funding. In addition, Augustine said that the nation’s industrial sector should do more to invest in research to create more jobs for scientists and engineers.

In the area of higher education, American universities were unarguably viewed as the finest overall institutions available five years ago.

“There was no one who could see any significant reason why that would be subject to change in the distant foreseeable future,” Augustine explained. “On the other hand as we now know with the collapse of the economy and tax revenues, U.S. public institutions find themselves facing increasing budget cuts.”

As a result, lists are being made of the star faculty members at U.S. institutions and they are being lured to institutions abroad, Augustine said.

The bottom line is that if we are going to compete in today’s global economy, we need to prepare our students to be successful engineers and commit ourselves to funding scientific research in America.