Sometimes science gets a bit of the backlash. Fundamentally, however, we can trace most of the difficulties back to the unwillingness of scientists to pay enough attention to the importance of explaining to the public what they were doing, how they were doing it, and what its consequences would be. After all, we work for the taxpayers and we have a responsibility to account to them in ways they can understand. We are in a very paradoxical situation. Our graduate education is the best in the world, as evidenced by the large number of foreign students who come to this country for graduate education.
Students vote with their feet.
In 1990 the number of foreign doctorates in engineering awarded by U.S. universities was over 50 percent. In 1994, the number of doctorates in mathematics and computer science to foreign candidates was over 50 percent, and the number of foreign graduate students in agriculture is presently approaching 50 percent. However, our problem has not been too many foreign students, but too few American students. However, at the undergraduate level, we're the only developed nation that doesn't have standards for what constitutes a college education. Thus, we have some institutions that provide education far beyond world standards in quality, and a very large number that provide an inferior education.