India's and China's educational systems — known for producing vast numbers of engineers — are commonly thought to be slowly and steadily overtaking the U.S. in technological leadership. But that may not be the case.
A controversial Duke University study contradicts that perception, pointing out that engineers are defined differently in different places. Those differences give the impression that foreign colleges are graduating more engineers, as measured by U.S. standards, than they really are. In addition to blurring the definition of the term, schools in India and China may not be graduating engineers of the same caliber as those in the United States. And their graduates may not be competitive in a global sense for a variety of reasons, including language issues and job locations.
