The U.S. Technology Skills Gap: What Every Technology Executive Must Know to Save America's Future, + Website

PREFACE

These educational gaps impose on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.

—MCKINSEY & COMPANY1

In a country that spends $583 billion each year on public education, the taxpayer deserves a better return on investment.2 For nearly two decades, America’s fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students have performed poorly in math and science compared to their peers in other countries. Over a slightly longer time frame, as our country’s education policy shifted to accountability under President George H. W. Bush, the results in domestic math and science assessment tests have been worse: SAT scores for math have stagnated since the 1980s, and verbal scores are now the worst on record for the SAT.

I have no “street cred” as an educator, although I did teach theology to high school freshmen in my first job out of college in 1972. But 30 years of conversations with information technology (IT) executives does afford me a small soapbox to step up on and broadcast loud and clear an escalating point of pain they shared with me: America’s schools are not producing individuals with the strong quantitative and communicative skills necessary to compete in the twenty-first-century global economy.

The skills landscape has changed significantly in America over the past 173 years. In 1840, 79 percent of the American labor force worked in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.3 Only 21 percent were employed in service jobs. By 2010, the composition did ...