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The received wisdom these days is that the United States will sink into permanent economic ruin because its youth are just awful, awful at STEM. (To the uninitiated: that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.) Yet new research punches some holes in that assumption. It even suggests that, golly, factors outside of schools will have an impact on our economic fate.

Who is responsible for this heresy? A couple of professors at Georgetown and Rutgers who had a look at the "STEM pipeline." They found that the supply of STEM students has held steady over the past four decades. Their more alarming finding was that the highest performers "have been dropping out of the STEM pipeline at a substantial rate." Yikes. So perhaps schools aren't the only leaky spots in the pipeline:

[T]his analysis does strongly suggest that students are not leaving STEM pathways because of lack of preparation or ability. Instead, it does suggest that we turn our attention to factors other than educational preparation or student ability in this compositional shift to lower-performing students in the STEM pipeline.

(Somewhere, Bob Compton is screaming.)

It seems the incentives for entering STEM professions aren't always that great. Just ask my two closest engineer friends, both of them former academic superstars who are currently out of work. The big payoffs have recently gone to the people who make money out of money. Anthony Cody puts it well:

The basis of our economy has to be growing things, building things, and harvesting energy. We need to get over the idea that we will get wealthy through speculation and catching the next bubble on the way up.

Don't think for a minute that U.S. students are doing well enough in STEM subjects. They're not. We should be particularly worried about poor performance among low-income students and students of color.

But it won't do just to increase supply. Schools aren't the sole saviors of our economy. 

Education is a critical engine in a hybrid economy that draws power from many sources. Schools have to improve their students' performance. That goes without saying. But we have to work on the demand side as well, or that crisp new engineering degree may be a ticket to nowhere, or at least nowhere very exciting. 

How can we inspire our students with visions of what they can make--besides money? And how can we reward their work down the road? Maybe green technologies can be the next moon shot for U.S. schools and universities.

As we pick up the pieces after an economic disaster wrought in part by mere speculators who excelled at math, it's galling to hear schools described as the main deadweight on our economy.