 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Council on Competitiveness Recommends NSF Fund Professional Science Master’s Programs
Council on Competitiveness
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
On December 15, 2004, the Council on Competitiveness, an organization of CEOs,
university presidents, and labor leaders, released the recommendations from its
year-long National Innovation Initiative (NII). The initiative brought together
more than 400 leaders and scholars from universities and colleges, corporations,
professional societies, industry associations and government agencies to create new
mechanisms to drive the pace and quality of the national innovation enterprise.
|
|
The study, under the leadership of a Principals Committee, chaired by Samuel J.
Palmisano, chairman and CEO of IBM Corporation and G. Wayne Clough, President of
the Georgia Institute of Technology, proposes actionable recommendations in three
key categories – talent, investment and infrastructure.
|
|
In order to produce the next generation of innovators, the study recommends the
establishment of an extensive portable graduate fellowship program to give control
of educational choices back to students; align federal and state skills needs more
closely with training resources while fostering stronger ties and partnerships
between academic institutions, industry and government to serve regional interests;
establish tax-advantaged lifelong learning accounts for employees to promote continuous
learning and new skills; improve health and pension portability; offer tax credits for
skill-based learning; and reform immigration policies to attract the best and the
brightest science and engineering students.
|
|
Specifically, the report notes that “the recently created Professional Science
Master’s (PSM) programs represent another promising approach that melds the worlds
of science and business, recognizing that productive careers for science students
are not limited to resarch laboratories or classrooms. The PSM creates the first
graduate degree in the sciences and mathematics that extends science training into
strategic planning and business management, as well as government regulation. The
programs focus on multidisciplinary specialties such as business and IT, biology and
IT (bioinformatics) and chemistry and IT (computational chemistry). The PSM attracts
the same relativley high proportion of women and historically underrepresented minority
students as do other master’s degree programs in science. The challenge is that these
programs and students fall outside traditional graduate school funding mechanisms and
lack an established base of support.” Therefore, the report recommends that the
National Science Foundation fund PSM programs at insitutions that demonstrate
innovatiave approaches to orienting master’s level degree programs toward scientific
or technical skills needed in the U.S. workforce. Institutions would be required to
provide matching funds to receive awards.
|
|
Further information on the other recommendations is available in the full report –
Innovate America: Thriving in a World of Challenge and Change – available for
download from www.compete.org. Also available
from the same source are the NII Working Group reports.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|