Jim Nowlan: With the Chinese outpacing our tech advances, has our ‘Sputnik moment' come and gone?

Chicago Tribune

7 days ago

In 1957, my high school science teacher stopped me in the corridor between classes. 'Do you know what just happened, Jim? Russia has sent a satellite into orbit around the earth!' He was shaken, and so was America. The haunting beeps emanating from Sputnik echoed around the globe — America's supremacy in military technology had been eclipsed by our rival.
Response was quick and substantial. Funding for the relatively new National Science Foundation was more than doubled. American education doubled down on science and technology. In a few years, America had landed a rocket on the moon. The competition for tech supremacy continues.
In recent months, Chinese tech company DeepSeek released an artificial intelligence model that is apparently faster and cheaper and uses much less electricity than our own technology. Once again, we should be shaken — but this time not surprised.
In the early 2000s, I became a visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, one of China's best. On the morning after my arrival, a Saturday, I came out of my 'foreign expert' guest quarters to stroll the leafy street outside. I saw several neatly uniformed youngsters on the sidewalks. When I saw my host professor on Monday, I asked about this. 'Oh, our children go to school on Saturdays, until noon,' she responded. And, I might add, during the school week, students have at least one more hour of instruction per day than in the U.S. and go to school for up to 245 days each year, versus our 175 to 180.
Not surprisingly, Shanghai youngsters fare much better on math achievement than do American youngsters, as well as do students in most developed nations.
I sense that if Shanghai parents were told their children could not go to school on Saturdays, there would be riots in the streets. And that if American parents were told their children had to go to school on Saturdays — and for another hour each weekday — there would be riots in the streets.
The short American school day and year are still basically rooted in the 19th century agrarian needs to have the kids available to work the farm in the summers. In 1983, alarmed by stagnant and weak educational achievement, educators issued the 'A Nation at Risk' report, aimed at spurring student achievement. Four decades later, a Stanford University analysis by Margaret Raymond, founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, notes that American student learning is still stagnant or in decline. So, I am amazed to read that many school districts have gone to or are contemplating a four-day school week. Alas. We need more time on task, not less.
With four times the U.S. population, China has more high honor students than we have students.
In the early 2000s, there were about 10 million Chinese enrolled in higher education in that country, while 20 million Americans studied at colleges and universities. Today, there are more than 50 million Chinese enrolled in higher education, a fivefold increase, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, whereas in America, our numbers have declined to about 19 million.
Again, back to my teaching at Fudan. I recall walking around the campus one early morning with Gu Yu, my assistant teacher; it was 6:30 or 7. We came upon a gaggle of young people standing in front of the entrance to a major building. 'What's going on there?' I asked Gu Yu. 'Oh, those are students, waiting for the library to open.'
China's paramount leader, Xi Jinping, has the goal of achieving supremacy in science and technology for his country. Operating by central planning, Xi can, certainly in the short term, devote to high education all the resources he deems necessary. An August 2024 article in Scientific American by Saima Iqbal chronicled dangerous decline in American research, 'while Chinese research surges.' President Donald Trump's blocking of billions in research grants for our major universities is like cutting off his nose to spite his face.
I heard from Chinese friends that Xi, who twice visited Iowa in his younger years to study American farm practices, considers our nation decadent. And that he aspires to repay the West for the humiliations we visited upon his country and their revered Empress Dowager Cixi in the 19th century, as Western nations carved up a technologically inferior China for commercial purposes.
What to do?
America's strengths include: one, our tradition of cutting-edge research, largely at our major universities, and two, the opportunity America provides for people to achieve. On a recent Amtrak trip, my seatmate, a young Korean who grew up in Turkey and now studies artificial intelligence in Minnesota, assured me the American Dream is still alive in the minds of young people around the world.
There are not enough smart Americans alone to remain supreme in scientific research. Right now, two-thirds of the workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, according to a recent report in the Mercury News, the Valley's newspaper.
We need to expand and leverage our research capacities and, combined with the lure of American opportunity, attract the absolute best and brightest (the top 1%) to our shores — and retain them here.
We sure could use another Sputnik moment.