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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Salins, Peter D.
The smart society : strengthening America’s greatest resource, its people / Peter D. Salins.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59403-701-6 (ebook)
1. Intellectual capital—United States. 2. Labor supply—Effect of education on—United States. 3. Education, Higher—Economic aspects—United States. I. Title.
HD53.S243 2013
658.4'038—dc23
2013030019
PRODUCED BY WILSTED & TAYLOR PUBLISHING SERVICES
Project manager Christine Taylor
Designer and compositor Nancy Koerner
Copy editor Nancy Evans
Proofreader Melody Lacina
Indexer Andrew Jroon
Dedicated to my greatest resource, my family:
Rochelle and Jonathan Salins, and Jessica, Mike, and Marissa Malloy.
Contents
One How America Became the World’s Smartest Society—And How It Can Stay That Way
Two American Education: The Keystone of a Smart Society
Four Closing the Mainstream Achievement Gap
Five Making College Pay Off
Six The High-Technology Workplace
Seven Ending Idleness as We Know It
Eight Importing Smart Americans
Nine Getting It Done
APPENDIX
Basics of the United States Immigration System
Notes
Index
What impelled me to write this book? During my long academic career in planning and public policy, I have weighed in often on many critical policy issues, generally driven by an optimistic outlook on the possibilities for constructive change, offering what I have believed were reasonable solutions to long-standing local, state, or national concerns. So it is with The Smart Society.
What is different this time, however, is the subject matter. I have written most extensively on issues related to urbanization, specifically on policies tied to physical places: housing, land use regulation, and the economic and social vitality of New York City. My first important foray in considering policies that directly affect the welfare of people rather than places was my last book-length work, Assimilation, American Style (Basic Books, 1997), which looked at America’s remarkable history in welcoming and assimilating immigrants. That was also my first venture in reflecting on American human capital, the focus of this book, because—as The Smart Society emphasizes—immigrants are above all one of its most indispensable wellsprings.
My intense interest in policies that can strengthen the capabilities of the American people (in other words, their human capital) took a quantum leap in the nearly ten years (1997 to 2006) that I served as chief academic officer—provost—of the State University of New York system (SUNY), the country’s largest public collection of colleges and universities. In this role I needed to give serious thought to the university’s underlying mission and how that related to the day-to-day operations of the system’s institutions. Being an agency of the state of New York, heavily dependent on revenues provided by the state’s taxpayers, we needed to be very clear on what the citizens and political leaders of the state expected of us and what our contribution to the state’s welfare might be.
On reflection, the answer was simple: New York, like every other American state, was in a desperate competition for human capital—with other states as well as other countries—and we were the state’s most comprehensive, and hopefully effective, vehicle to help New York grow its human capital and win that race. Because of the university’s vast size, and the great diversity among its sixty-four campuses, SUNY touched just about every aspect of human-capital development. Our thirteen teacher training programs and thirty community colleges prepared teachers, aides, and administrators for preschool through high school; our Charter School Institute oversaw half the state’s charter schools; all of our campuses together turned out the lion’s share of New York’s college graduates; our research universities, medical schools, and partner Cornell University conducted path-breaking research and development that enriched the human capital of American workplaces; SUNY’s alliances with educational institutions and industries abroad generated human capital across the world; and, finally, great numbers of our faculty and students were immigrants, what I refer to as imported human capital.
My efforts as university provost to help our campuses succeed in carrying out their diverse missions gave me a close-up view of the places that actually generated human capital and many of the problems they faced in doing so. Let me cite just a few examples.
The university’s original and still paramount human-capital contribution was in turning out tens of thousands of college graduates each year. Yet SUNY community-college and baccalaureate campuses were continually bedeviled by unsatisfactory graduation rates—a problem because the full benefits of a costly college experience depend on successful completion. Tracking that issue down, we found a nearly perfect correlation of graduation rates with the quality of students’ high school preparation. Since a majority of our students come from the state’s high schools, and the majority of those schools’ teachers are trained in SUNY colleges, we took a hard look at our teacher training programs. What we found there was weak grounding in core subjects—mathematics being