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Student loan interest rates go up effective July 1st.

Many people perceive this as another obstacle on the road to a higher education which is getting

increasingly less affordable for many Americans.

But education policy analyst Neil McCluskey has a different take on the story.

Is America lagging behind China in engineering and the sciences? We're not lagging behind China in engineering in the sciences?

We're not lagging behind China in the sciences.

What happened was about a year ago there was a report put out originally a number by Fortune magazine that said,

well, the Chinese are producing 600,000 engineers a year,

we're only producing 70,000.

Well, it turns out that those numbers were really just based on a very imprecise Chinese government estimation.

Unfortunately, that information was picked up by the National Academies of Science, and then they put it in a highly influential report that was

then repeated by politicians and analysts and people all over the country.

Well, it turns out that some researchers at Duke then looked at those numbers and said there's no way that's

possible and they rounded those numbers down and said well actually if you look at the

equivalent of an engineer in the United States China only produced 350,000 of those and the United States,

unlike what the popular estimates were, didn't produce 70,000, they produced about 140,000.

So in no way, especially if you calculate per capita

are we behind the Chinese?

We're still ahead of them.

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