Some of the country’s most promising young scientists, in Washington this week to be honored at the White House, offered some useful insights for policymakers about the nation’s science innovation ecosystem: 1) The United States has a lot going for it– fine universities and talented, curious and innovative people eager to bring about monumental transformations, 2) Government funding is critical– often the only source for basic research and 3) Scale back on item #2 and you compromise #1. At a...

Whenever there is a conversation in Washington about competitiveness you can almost guarantee that it will quickly default to “fixing K-12.” And usually along the way someone makes the statement, “We all know that K-12 is broken, but thank God the United States has the best higher education system in the world. But as I argued last year in a post “The Failure of American Higher Education,” we don’t. I argued that there was disturbing evidence that many colleges were failing to adequately educate...