Although advanced science education did not begin to thrive in the United States until the last third of the nineteenth century, scientific learning has long been a part of American intellectual and cultural life. In colonial America, mathematics and natural philosophy formed a standard part of a college education. As a Harvard student in the 1750s, John Adams studied both subjects, as did Thomas Jefferson and James Madison at William and Mary and the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), respectively. Natural history entered the university curriculum toward the end of the eighteenth century, and in 1802, the establishment of the United States Military Academy at West Point provided a center for engineering education to meet the new nation's military engineering needs.
Social settings outside the colleges and universities also provided important forums for learning and discussing the truths of the natural world. In Europe, the rise of print culture and an active literary public sphere, and the creation of new institutions such as London's Royal Society, with its gentlemanly forms of discourse, or the Parisian salon where men and women pursued science as a form of entertainment, all played a central role in disseminating the natural philosophy of the Enlightenment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Similar developments characterized scientific learning in America during the colonial and early national periods, through learned societies such as Philadelphia's American Philosophical Society, public lecture-demonstrations by men of science, and newly established museums with natural history collections.
Nevertheless, by the middle of the nineteenth century the boosters of American science remained acutely aware that scientific learning in the United States was still distinctly second-rate. Books were scarce, and standard sources in European libraries were absent from American shelves. In universities, the prohibitively high cost of scientific apparatus meant that laboratory instruction was almost nonexistent. Natural history flourished thanks to the wealth of living organisms and fossils that required identification and classification, but American science had little to celebrate in fields such as chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Opportunities for advanced science education were few, and Europe remained the preferred option for those who wanted high-quality training.
With the nationwide trend toward professionalization in the 1840s, opportunities for higher education in science and engineering gradually increased. West Point's engineering program had declined by the 1830s, but in 1835, the Rensselaer Institute (renamed Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1851) helped fill the gap by awarding the nation's first civil engineering degrees. Engineering education expanded further in the 1850s and 1860s with the founding of new engineering schools such as Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the 1870s, there were eighty-five engineering schools in the United States. Scientific schools proliferated as well. Yale founded its School of Applied Chemistry in 1847, which evolved into the Sheffield Scientific School in 1861 (the same year that Yale awarded the nation's first Ph.D.s, one in physics and two outside the sciences), and other universities followed suit. The United States could boast seventy such schools by 1873. The passage of the Morrill Act in 1862 provided an additional boost to science and engineering by providing states with land grants to endow colleges and universities "for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts." More than seventy institutions were either established or assisted under the Morrill Act, including Cornell University, University of Minnesota, and University of Wisconsin.
This expansion of science and engineering education represented a change in scale, but less a change in kind. The opening of Johns Hopkins University in 1876, however, signaled the creation of a new kind of institution: the American research university, dedicated primarily to graduate education and the generation of new knowledge, particularly in the sciences. By the turn of the century, research had become a central criterion for all universities that aspired to academic excellence. In the early twentieth century, other institutions, particularly philanthropic foundations, began to combine forces with the universities to promote advanced scientific education and research. The Rockefeller Foundation, launched in 1913, played a major role in building American leadership in science. During the 1920s, for example, a generation of brilliant young American physicists studied in Europe, most with support from the Rockefeller-funded National Research Council fellowship program, and their return to American academic positions turned the United States into a major center of physics where aspiring physicists could find high-quality training. A few years later, the rise of fascism forced many of Europe's best physicists to seek refuge in the United States, and American physics reached even greater heights.
Ultimately, however, World War II and the Cold War played the most important role in transforming American science education into its currently recognizable form. Leading research universities in science and engineering fields built their reputations upon the foundations of wartime and postwar funding for research. Wartime defense spending, for example, helped transform MIT into a truly distinguished research center. MIT led universities with $117 million in defense contracts during the war, and with the rise of the Cold War and the permanent mobilization of science by the federal government, the institute continued to be a center of military-sponsored research. Stanford University also benefited immensely from the new relationship between science and the federal government. Although Stanford University held few wartime defense contracts, after the war its administrators aggressively pursued Cold War defense dollars in order to turn their university into a first-rate research institution. Within a few years Stanford rivaled MIT for preeminence in electrical engineering and other fields that commanded generous defense contracts.
Cold War funding and the massive expansion of university-based research transformed science education in a variety of ways. The physical sciences received well over 90 percent of their research funds from military sources in the 1950s and 1960s. As military needs shifted disciplinary priorities, science and engineering students gained a new sense of the kinds of research problems that earned professional acclaim. For example, the entire discipline of electrical engineering redefined itself around military problems. At MIT, a significant number of students wrote dissertations on classified projects, and even the textbooks reflected military topics. Its aeronautical engineering program turned away from questions of safety to an almost exclusive concern with high-performance aircraft. Such Cold War trends reproduced themselves, to varying degrees, at the major research universities across the country.
As a result of federal support for university research, postwar America could boast the best advanced scientific education in the world. There did not always seem to be enough students to take advantage of that education, however, and throughout the Cold War, policymakers continually worried about shortages in scientific manpower. They responded with educational initiatives designed to ensure a steady supply of scientists. In 1948 the Atomic Energy Commission established the largest program for advanced science education in the nation's history by providing generous fellowship support to hundreds of students each year for graduate and postdoctoral work in physics, mathematics, biology, and medicine. Federal educational support increased further after the Soviet launch of Sputnik prompted a nervous Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The act appropriated more than $370 million to promote education in science, engineering, and other areas, such as foreign language study, deemed necessary to provide expertise for waging the Cold War.
After the 1960s, government efforts increasingly focused on creating educational opportunities for women and minorities in order to augment the scientific talent pool. Government policies helped growing numbers of women and racial minorities to pursue scientific careers, but African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans still report the persistence of systemic barriers and subtle forms of discrimination. By 1999, members of under-represented minority groups—African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans—still earned less than 10 percent of science and engineering doctorates. In physics these minorities accounted for only 3.6 percent of doctorates, or just twenty-six physics degrees across the entire nation. Women have become increasingly visible in the life sciences, where in 1999 they earned over 40 percent of doctoral degrees, but only 23 percent of Ph.D.s in the physical sciences (and less than 13 percent in physics) went to women. In the meantime, a heavy influx of science and engineering students from abroad played a key role in providing the United States with scientific talent. By the 1990s, foreigners constituted nearly 40 percent of science and engineering doctoral students in the United States, and two-thirds accepted American employment after earning their degrees. Among Chinese and Indians, nearly 80 percent chose to remain in the United States. Immigration also contributed to the relatively large percentage of Asian Americans who have earned science and engineering doctorates, since the highly educated Asian immigrants who came to the United States in large numbers beginning in the 1960s viewed science and engineering as means of upward mobility, and they encouraged their children to follow similar career paths. In 1999, Asian Americans earned over 11 percent of science and engineering doctorates, even though their percentage of the total U.S. population stood in the low single digits.
The evolution of science education has thus moved in tandem with larger social and political currents—transformed not only by institutional change but by domestic social change, which has led radically different groups of people to pursue science and engineering degrees in twenty-first-century America.
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