math education and US

THE SUCCESS OF GLOBAL ECONOMY is based on our access to talent. The need to access resources such as oil, natural gas and raw materials is still there, but hiring and retaining talented workers is the paramount concern of businesses in today's hypercompetitive global economy.Technology giants such as Google and Yahoo are engaging in creative hiring strategies aimed at bringing in the brightest talent. Recruiting tools include Google's billboards with complicated mathematical problems and Yahoo's hiring academic superstars.The competition for the best and brightest talent is also being played out on a global stage. It is no longer just a matter of cost or quantity -- it is increasingly a matter of quality.Many companies in the United States extend their searches globally to locate qualified candidates. The very success of places such as Silicon Valley is tied to the fact that they have been able to attract some of the best and the brightest from all over the world.
The facts speak for themselves: Nearly 50 percent of U.S. Nobel Prize winners in the past seven years were born abroad; more than half of the Ph.D.s working in America are immigrants; Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs started more than 25 percent of the successful Silicon Valley companies; immigrants co-founded technology giants Google and Sun Microsystems.Success in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area is a result of a highly entrepreneurial global economy that has attracted exceptional talent from around the world to work, innovate and attend world-class research universities that include UC Berkeley, Stanford and UC San Francisco.So why is there a shortage of talent in the United States, despite our many attractions as a place to work and live? The answer is straightforward. The United States is not graduating enough engineers and technical professionals, and fewer talented and ambitious workers are coming to the United States.Although countries such as India and China are graduating more engineers, they are also feeling the shortage of technical talent as their economies grow at record paces.In 2004, the United States graduated nearly 137,00 engineers, India 112,000 and China nearly 351,000, according to a Duke University study. Since then, the rate of engineering graduates from India and China has accelerated relative to the United States.