House Breathes New Life into Tech Talent Bill

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WASHINGTON NEWS House Breathes New Life into Tech Talent Bill Last year’s Technology Talent Act was approved by a voice vote in the House of Representatives. Renamed “The Undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Improvement Act,” the bill would award $25 million to the National Science Foundation (NSF) each year, for a period of five years, to encourage more U.S. students to pursue careers in science, math, engineering, and technology. Following a March 7 hearing, the bipartisan bill was approved by the House Research Subcommittee on May 9 and by the full House Science Committee on May 22. It then moved to the full House of Representatives for consideration where it passed quickly. The bill was first introduced last October in the House as H.R. 3130 by Reps. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), John Larson (D-Conn.), Melissa Hart (RPa.), Mike Honda (D-Calif.), and Mark Udall (D-Colo.). It was introduced in the Senate as S. 1549 by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), and Pete Domenici (RN.M.) (see MRS Bulletin, November 2001, p. 866, and January 2002, p. 10). The Senate version is still awaiting action by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Unlike more traditional educational approaches, such as the establishment of fellowship programs, H.R. 3130 employs an innovative strategy of rewarding colleges and universities that succeed in increasing the numbers of science and engineering majors through programmatic changes that retain talented students. Principally, the bill would authorize NSF to award competitive grants to institutions of higher learning to increase the number and quality of graduates in these fields, as well as to encourage institutional reform to place a higher value on faculty participation in undergraduate education. It would also establish grants for undergraduate institutions to purchase researchgrade equipment. Thus far, the bill has received strong support from professional scientific societies, industry leaders, and organizations, many of which have expressed concern about sharply declining numbers of U.S.born undergraduate and graduate stu-

dents in math, materials science, physics, and engineering. Iver Anderson, a professor at Iowa State University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and current vice president of the Federation for Materials Societies, said that his department received 180 graduate school applications this year, nearly all of them from students born outside the United States. “I could count the number of applications from U.S.-born students on one hand, and that number is not far off from what I hear from a number of other universities,” he said. “U.S. universities do a terrific job of educating researchers, but right now we seem to be educating the world’s researchers at the exclusion of U.S. citizens.” Those students are needed to replace an aging work force in materials science, as well as other technical fields, according to Anderson. T

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