CONGRESSMAN SHERWOOD BOEHLERT (R-NY)
SPEECH TO NATIONAL SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERS
June 14, 2002
It's a pleasure to be here this evening and an honor to receive your Legislative Service award. And I want all of you to know that the recognition and appreciation are mutual.
In fact, on the way down here, I was musing about how much contemporary society owes to engineers. I mean - think about it - I drove down here in a car designed by, among others, automotive engineers, over roads designed by civil engineers. This speech was written on a machine designed by computer engineers, powered by energy systems designed by electrical engineers and housed in a building designed by mechanical engineers.
By the time I got here, my gratitude toward your profession was tinged with fear and resentment. I realized that we are all not only in your debt, but also at your mercy. It was a sobering thought. It made me happy that I have good news to report to you.
And indeed I do have very good news to report because in recent weeks the Congress has once again demonstrated its support for science and engineering research. And, led by our House Science Committee, I expect the Congress will continue to show its support in the months ahead.
I'm referring, in particular, to the vote in the House last week on a bill that would put the National Science Foundation (NSF) on a path to doubling its budget - now about $4 billion - over the next five years. The bill would authorize 15 percent increases for NSF for each of the next three years.
I introduced the bill with several Members of the Science Committee, and it passed unanimously in Committee, and by the overwhelming margin of 397 to 25 in the House. That's no small feat at a time when we are rightly worried about the budget deficit and our defense needs.
But the Congress has come to recognize that our national security and our future economic success rest on the investments in research and development (R&D) we make today. And there's a growing recognition that our R&D investments of late have excessively favored the biomedical field.
I'm not suggesting by that that we should cut back on biomedical research. Far from it. Our commitment to double the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - a doubling that should be completed next year - is paying off handsomely.
But improving health care is not the only challenge the nation faces, and even health research depends on advances in other fields. Yet just the proposed increase in the NIH budget for next year is larger than the entire proposed research budget of the National Science Foundation. That indicates things may have gotten a little out of whack. We have to ensure that the physical sciences and engineering are also moving forward.
This is the way I made the case on the House floor during the NSF debate. I said, "When we look at the new fields of science and engineering that will boost our economy in this new century, fields like nanotechnology, where do we turn to ensure that our nation's researchers stay at the cutting edge? NSF.
"When we look at the field of information technology, which facilitates every activity in today's economy, where do we turn to ensure that the U.S. remains at the cutting edge? NSF.
"When we consider our ever more urgent need for a highly skilled, technologically literate workforce, where do we turn to ensure that our education system from kindergarten through post-graduate work is preparing the people we need? NSF.
"We turn to NSF to solve some of our most pressing problems; we can't turn from NSF when we decide where to invest federal funds."
Apparently, I made my point. With the passage of our bill - which we've dubbed the "Investing in America's Future Act" - Congress turned definitively toward NSF. And I'll be working with another friend of NSF, Congressman Jim Walsh of Syracuse, to ensure that that turn results in real dollars. Jim chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee that makes the final decisions on how much NSF can spend each year.
I should add that our investment in NSF is not only good for the nation as a whole; it's good for New York. New York State receives more money from NSF than any other state except California. And the impact of that money is felt right here in the Southern Tier. Binghamton received $1.8 million from NSF last year, and Cornell - the third largest NSF recipient in the country - received $84 million.
I should point out, too, that this money is for education as well as research - and not only graduate education.
Some of the money is being used for programs to include pre-college education throughout our region. Those projects will have benefits for years to come.
In fact, one of the first steps I took as chairman of the Science Committee was to make improving math, science and engineering education - at all levels - our top priority. It's easy to understand why. In the long run, nothing else we do as a nation will matter, if we don't have an educated workforce and citizenry to carry on.
Yet today, our nation's high school students rank close to the bottom in international comparisons of math and science proficiency. More embarrassing still, relative performance gets worse the longer they are in school.
In the definitive study, the Third International Math and Science Survey (TIMSS), our fourth graders ranked near the top of international comparisons; our eighth graders near the middle; and our high school students near the bottom. Hardly the curve one would hope to see.
So we need to take action. Happily, the President has made education one of his top priorities, and he proposed a specific program for math and science education - the Math and Science Partnerships. The Science Committee wrote the legislation to make the proposal a reality, and it passed the House unanimously around this time last year.
The goal of the program is to bring the expertise of higher education and businesses to bear on the challenge of improving pre-college education. Under the program, NSF will give grants to partnerships of school districts or state education departments and universities, colleges and businesses designed to improve K-12 math and science education.
NSF is spending $160 million on the program this year, and we hope to increase that next year to $200 million - the President's full request.
These partnerships can work in all sorts of ways. But some of the obvious ones are having universities bring teachers up to date on the latest advances in the disciplines they teach, having universities and teachers work together to come up with new approaches to teaching - including those that integrate the latest technology - and enabling students and teachers to participate in university research projects.
But the ideas won't come from Washington; they'll come from the partnerships applying for the funding, and I expect we'll see a lot of creative approaches that we wouldn't have thought of.
We're also creating some additional programs beyond the Partnerships the President proposed.
The one I'm most proud of is the Noyce Scholarship Program, named for one of the inventors of the transistor. This is a program that I've been pushing for years, and that we've finally been able to get funded.
Under this program, top math, science and engineering majors will be able to get federal scholarships during their junior and senior years in college. In return, they'll commit to teach in a public school - two years for each year they receive a scholarship. The grant awards will actually be to colleges and universities, which will not only award the scholarships, but will have to run programs to ensure that the students are prepared to teach and to encourage them to remain in the field.
I hope this will help address a critical problem in math and science education - too many teachers who have no background or certification in the fields they're teaching.
Those teachers, despite their best efforts, not only can't provide the same depth as a better-prepared teacher, they often inadvertently convey their lack of interest or uneasiness with math and science.
Nothing else we do to improve math and science education will have as much effect as improving the quality of our math and science teachers. The Noyce Scholarships will signal that the nation understands that and values the work of our teachers.
I should note to this crowd that the Noyce program also provides stipends for professional scientists and engineers who want to enter teaching, but need coursework to get certified to teach.
So I encourage all of you to think about how you could help improve education - by volunteering, if you're not looking for a change of career. The New York City subways had a great ad campaign to attract folks into teaching a year or so ago.
The signs said something like, "When was the last time you heard about someone leaving teaching to do something more meaningful?" That brought home the point pretty forcefully. But our education problems don't end with high school. Undergraduate education has often suffered from neglect, and we lose many students who think they are interested in math, science and engineering during their first two years of college. Some studies suggest that the attrition rate during those years may be as high as 50 percent nationwide. The problem is especially acute in the physical sciences, math and engineering, in which the absolute number of majors has been dropping. We simply can't afford to alienate that many students. There are many reasons why too few students are majoring in the math, science and engineering, but one is that universities are often more interested in "weeding out" students than in encouraging them.
The economist Paul Romer at Stanford argues that this is an economic decision as well as a cultural one - science and enginnering students cost universities a lot of money because of the need for labs. To counter the various forces that conspire to turn students away from math, science and engineering, we've put together a bill to encourage colleges and universities to put more of their resources into undergraduate education. The bill is called the Tech Talent Act, and I've introduced it in the House, and Joe Lieberman has introduced it in the Senate.
The House version was approved by the Science Committee unanimously last month, and I hope the full House will vote on it before the August recess. The bill has been strongly endorsed by high tech companies, which are struggling to find well trained Americans to work in their businesses.
The idea of the bill is so simple that it's amazing it hasn't been tried before. Under the bill, NSF would award grants to colleges and universities that propose ways to improve their undergraduate education programs in math, the physical sciences or engineering, and in return the institution must increase the number of graduating majors in those fields by a specified number that they select.
Continuation of the grant is predicated on achieving the numerical goal without reducing student quality. Spurred on by the introduction of our bill, NSF has started a small, experimental program this year to test out the idea. The response has been overwhelming: 177 schools have applied, seeking almost $60 million. The program is budgeted at only $5 million this year, but it would get at least $25 million when it is fully funded.
I'll spare you any additional legislative details. The point, though, is that we need to do more to ensure that math, science and engineering research and education are prospering, that Congress recognizes that, and that we are making concerted efforts to increase our investments in these areas.
Are we doing enough yet? No. The proposed budgets for research and education throughout the federal government have been too small - and the necessary response to the events of September 11th has limited our ability to spend as much as we would like. But we're making progress. Actually, the impact of September 11th on the funding for science and engineering is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the costs of the war in Afghanistan and security measures will reduce the money available for other purposes. On the other hand, everyone recognizes that science and technology have to be among the tools we use to respond to the terrorist threat. As I like to say, the war on terrorism, like the Cold War, will be won in the laboratory as much as on the battlefield.
The President has included a research component in his proposal to create a Department of Homeland Defense, although much of it will be targeted initially toward research on bioterrorism. But the Department also will include a unit responsible for combating cyberterrorism, and that will also require research. Indeed, in February, the House, by a vote of 400-12, passed my bill to create new programs at NSF and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to finance research to develop new ways to protect our computer systems and networks. We took this step after hearings that showed that cybersecurity research, despite its importance, was a backwater in government, academia and industry - lacking sufficient leadership, funding, students and ideas.
Our bill will go a long way toward correcting that. 16 Well, I could go on and on - and perhaps I have - in discussing the steps we have been taking, or should take to ensure that we have more engineering research, more engineering students, and more engineering jobs. I haven't even had a chance to mention two other Committee priorities beyond education - energy and the environment - or our oversight of NASA. Those are all issues important to our nation and to our region, and in which engineers are key players. I'll give you just one example.
The House and Senate are about to begin a conference to reconcile differences between our versions of H.R. 4, a massive energy bill. As Science Committee chairman, I'm one of the conferees who will write the final bill, which I hope will be more balanced than the bill the House passed last August. Much of the media coverage of the bill has understandably focused on big, controversial issues like oil drilling in the Arctic.
But the bill also authorizes billions of dollars in research and development on energy efficiency and alternative fuels, including programs to promote alternative fueled buses that could help Orion Industries in Oriskany and Lockheed-Martin in this area; and a new government-industry-academia partnership to develop solid-state lighting in which one of the major participants would be General Electric in Schenectady.
So while what we do in Washington may seem remote or obscure - I won't offer up some of the even more damning adjectives - the federal government can do a lot that has direct benefits for our region, especially for engineers in our region. And when I remember that, then I don't feel so nervous about the way we're all dependent on engineers.
I look forward to continuing to work with all of you to ensure that you have the people, the tools and the knowledge you need to make life better for everyone. Thank you very much.