Michael Yuan

Wow, American scientists have a clean sweep on this year’s Nobel science prizes. This year’s medicine / physics / chemistry Laureates are all scientists working in American research universities. Of course, it is not news that American universities dominate the world when it comes to scientific research. But what’s intriguing is that those Nobel Laureates are also graduates from the supposely “failing” American high schools.

As anyone who has attended graduate school in a major American university knows, the research and teaching staff in those universities are disproportionally immigrants (w.r.t to the immigrants population in the US population). In fact, quite a few past American Nobel Laureates are first-generation immigrants coming here on F-1 / H-1 visas. Many people say that illustrates US high schools’ inability to produce top quality students for world-class research programs. But what do this year’s Nobel awards tell us? Well, I think it tells us that science education in US high schools is both successful and failing — on different fronts. US high schools are successful in turning out star scientists but fail to educate the mass about science …

Research has suggested (sorry forgot the link) that American high school kids score lower in tests compared with, say Japanese and Chinese kids, primarily because they spend less time on “studying”. Instead they spend more time developing their personal interests (or, just partying :)). Few students in other parts of the world have this luxury — they are buried in homeworks and academic assignments designed to improve test scores but not to promote personal interests. As we see from this year’s Nobel Laureates, once an American student figures out that science is his / her passion, he / she has no problem reaching the top.

In fact, I think that abundance of foreign talents in US universities and tech industry simply means that America is very good at attracting and retaining top talent from all over the world. That is a very good thing for America. (Note to immigration / H-1 opponents: immigrants created much more jobs than they “took away”. Think about how many jobs Sergey Brin and Linus Torvalds created?)

Having said that, I still think there are big problems with American high schools. While the high schools can produce seeds for top scientists, they lack the capability to mass-produce workers with basic math / science skills, which is really what the economy needs. I do not think the problem here is the lack of testing or academic assigments. Rather, it is the lack of the “culture” to respect and promote science in schools. The challenge is how do we make science “cool” and how to get kids interested in it before it is too late (that is, after the kid graduates and found himself / herself unable to find a job due to the lack of science / math skills).