Very interesting article published in todays Star.

PS: instead of the link to the article I normally paste the whole article in the post as link is good for only 14 days.

Thanks and regards.
Biomed
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Education, not location, key to a nation's wealth


DAVID CRANE

One clear lesson from accelerating globalization and the growing competition for high-skill knowledge jobs from China, India, Brazil and other emerging market nations is that education matters.

Those societies that are able to produce creative, high-quality populations will have the advantage in years ahead. Indeed, for Canada and the United States, our economic future depends on being centres for highly innovative businesses that can operate at the frontiers of new knowledge, converting this new knowledge into commercially successful goods and services.

This depends on a serious commitment to people, what might be called human development, starting in the first years of life, where the trajectories for lifetime learning are set through primary and secondary school to universities and colleges, and beyond that to ongoing skills upgrading and lifelong learning.

We are clearly not there yet, and there is no time to waste as emerging market economies move into many skill areas we used to assume would always be ours.

Carly Fiorina, chair of Hewlett-Packard Inc., argues "there is no job that is America's God-given right anymore." Nations such as India, China, Brazil and Mexico are busy developing the skills to compete for jobs that once would have been done only in advanced economies such as Canada and the United States. It's why Nortel Networks Inc. can build a major research centre in China.

As Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel Inc., says, these and other nations are increasingly able to provide higher education to their people.

"China graduates twice as many students with Bachelor's degrees and six times as many engineering majors as the United States, and India and Singapore are pumping out scientists through top-notch undergraduate programs.

"In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did, including 100,000 more in the sciences and 60,000 more in engineering," he noted recently.

Microsoft Corp. chair Bill Gates recently blitzed top U.S. universities urging students to pursue careers in electrical engineering and computer science.

In some big U.S. universities student enrolments in these fields have fallen by almost one-third. (In Canada, enrolments have increased. In Ontario, for example, there were 16,060 full-time undergraduates in electrical engineering and computer science in 2002, compared to 11,466 in 1998. Likewise, full-time enrolment at the Master's level rose from 867 to 1,497 and at the Ph.D. level from 457 to 762.)

Yet, Gates stressed, "people's opportunity to have great jobs in the future will be far more determined by their level of education than by what country they happen to be in."

This is a bigger change than we might realize.

As Gates said, "historically, your education level didn't matter that much. If you lived in a rich country you made a lot of money, and if you were in a poor country you made very little money.

"Now the opportunity for educated people worldwide to help out, to contribute to products, not just software products but anything you can imagine, architecture, law, answering the phone, it will be done where people have those skills."

There's no doubt American executives are worried about the quality of their education system. For example, the Computer Systems Policy Group, representing major U.S. computer companies, says "the U.S. public education system remains the nation's biggest competitive disadvantage."

In Canada, we are better off, as results on international tests show. But we still have problems.

In Toronto, for example, a report by the city's children's services department shows that there are wide variations across the city between test results for grade 3 and grade 6 reading and math and these variations are closely linked to differences in family income.

The same is true for grade 1 absenteeism rates and measures of readiness to learn for students entering the school system. Moreover, as Ontario's Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity reports, when it comes to education "we underinvest relative to the United States and that this underinvestment is more pronounced as we move through the education system."

On a per student basis, Canada invests 81 per cent of U.S. levels in the school system, 86 per cent for colleges, and 63 per cent for universities.

Globalization is not a zero-sum game. Rather, it should be seen as a positive-sum game. But for countries such as Canada, success in the new global economy will depend on how well we prepare ourselves for it. The place to start is with the education and skills essential for this new kind of world.

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"Change before you have to" : Jack Welch