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U.S. Science and Engineering Research Flattens

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the height-of-the-golden-age dept.

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "The National Science Foundation is reporting that the number of published U.S. science and engineering articles plateaued in the 1990s, despite continued increases in funding and personnel for research and development. This came after two decades of continued growth. Since then, flattening has occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions. In contrast, Asian and EU research had significant increases in this period. They do point to one positive for the US, however: article quality. According to one of the researchers, 'the more often an article is cited by other publications, the higher quality it's believed to have. While citation is not a perfect indicator, U.S. publications are more highly cited than those from other countries.'"

1 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We always used foreign scientist/engineers by moeinvt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "No child left behind?"

    I think a major part of the problem is that the U.S. public education system has an overwhelming focus on bringing the slow learning underachievers up to par. Far too little is done to accelerate and unleash the potential of the best and brightest. Raise your hand if you were in the public education system and got all 'A' and 'B' grades while rarely or never bringing a book home with you. I susepct that most of the readers here were taking AP or college prep classes as well.

    With idiotic programs like "No child left behind" the entire herd has to move at the pace of the slowest member. For example, I know an elementary school teacher that has a small group of students who are children of recent immigrants. They barely speak English, yet the school is supposed to make sure that they don't get "left behind"? Where do you think she needs to focus all of her extra effort? The phrase is emotionally pleasing, but the implementation has serious negative consequences (I HOPE they are unintended, but I'm not sure). I think that kids SHOULD be left behind a lot more frequently than they are.

    I'd be in favor of getting the Federal government out of the public education system entirely. We should eliminate the Dept.of Education and distribute the entire department budget as block grants to the states for the next couple of years.