In President Barack Obama’s speech to the National Academy of Sciences this week, he said that his goal was “to foster the next generation of scientists and engineers.” Which is us, by the way. Obama vows to invest in science, to the order of magnitude of $150 billion over 10 years. This money will hopefully be seen by RPI graduates working in industry and academia, as well as RPI students in need of financial aid.
In his speech, Obama talked about how in recent years, science has become too intertwined with ideology, but plans to fix this. Scientists cannot solve all the world’s problems, but they can cure diseases, extract energy from renewable resources, and feed the hungry better meals for less money. I respect that Obama has such high goals, including, “solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; and prosthetics so advanced that someone could play the piano again.”
Furthermore, his method seems to be focused on education. He puts faith in young people, pointing out that the average age in the NASA control rooms during the early Apollo years was in the mid-20s. In the future, I want to be able to send my children to American public schools and not worry that it will put them at a disadvantage compared to children learning math and science in other developed countries. Already, the United States is ranked below Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and other nations in science and math education. This trend needs to be reversed. We are all lucky to be able to attend RPI, but I’m sure each one of you knows someone you went to high school with who could have done the work and contributed so much, if only there had been more financial aid. It sounds like Obama plans to change the way math and science are taught and make more tax money available to students wanting to study math and science at the university level.
And even if his promises seem a bit far reaching, he certainly made one step in the right direction. Our own president Shirley Ann Jackson was appointed to his Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. We have all sat through Jackson’s impressive (and lengthy) list of achievements many times, so I have full confidence she and the other advisors (including such notables as Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft Corporation, and Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, Inc. and a member of the board of directors of Apple, Inc.) will lead the United States back into the forefront of science and technology.
