A STRATEGY FOR AMERICAN INNOVATION, GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.''

A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs

"History should be our guide.  The United States led the world’s economies in the 20th century because we led the world in innovation.  Today, the competition is keener; the challenge is tougher; and that is why innovation is more important than ever. It is the key to good, new jobs for the 21st century.  That’s how we will ensure a high quality of life for this generation and future generations. With these investments, we’re planting the seeds of progress for our country, and good-paying, private-sector jobs for the American people."

-President Barack Obama, August 5, 2009

SEPTEMBER 2009

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Since taking office, President Obama has taken historic steps to lay the foundation for the innovation economy of the future. The Obama Innovation Strategy builds on well over $100 billion of Recovery Act funds that support innovation, additional support for education, infrastructure and others in the Recovery Act and the President’s Budget, and novel regulatory and executive order initiatives. It seeks to harness the inherent ingenuity of the American people and a dynamic private sector to ensure that the next expansion is more solid, broad-based, and beneficial than previous ones. It focuses on critical areas where sensible, balanced government policies can lay the foundation for innovation that leads to quality jobs and shared prosperity. It has three parts:

1. Invest in the Building Blocks of American Innovation. We must first ensure that our economy is given all the necessary tools for successful innovation, from investments in research and development to the human, physical, and technological capital needed to perform that research and transfer those innovations.

• Restore American leadership in fundamental research. President Obama implemented the largest increase in basic R&D in history, which will lay the foundation for new discoveries and new technologies that will improve our lives and create the industries of the future.
   
• Educate the next generation with 21st century knowledge and skills while creating a world-class workforce. President Obama has proposed initiatives to dramatically improve teaching and learning in K-12 education, expand access to higher education and training, and promote student achievement and careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields.
   
• Build a leading physical infrastructure. Through the Recovery Act, the President has committed to a historic investment in our nation’s roads, bridges, transit, and air transportation networks to connect our people and our businesses.
   
• Develop an advanced information technology ecosystem. For America to lead the world in the technologies of the future, President Obama believes that all Americans must have affordable 21st century access to the Internet.
   

2. Promote Competitive Markets that Spur Productive Entrepreneurship. It is imperative to create a national environment ripe for entrepreneurship and risk taking that allows U.S. companies to be internationally competitive in a global exchange of ideas and innovation. Through competitive markets, innovations diffuse and scale appropriately across industries and globally.

• Promote American exports. Exports will play an increasingly critical role in the future of the American economy, and the President’s plans will ensure fair and open markets for American producers.
   
• Support open capital markets that allocate resources to the most promising ideas. Open capital markets are one of the greatest strengths of the American economy, and the President is committed to making sure these markets work.
   
• Encourage high-growth and innovation-based entrepreneurship. The Obama Administration believes it is essential that entrepreneurs continue to create new and vibrant businesses that lead to new jobs and economic growth.
   
• Improve public sector innovation and support community innovation. Innovation must occur within all levels of society, including the government itself. The Obama Administration supports the broad adoption of community innovations that work and is committed to making government perform better and more efficiently, including by working more openly.

3. Catalyze Breakthroughs for National Priorities. There are certain sectors of exceptional national importance where the market is unlikely to produce the desirable outcomes on its own. These include developing alternative energy sources, reducing costs and improving lives with health IT, and manufacturing advanced vehicles. In these industries where markets may fail on their own, government can be part of the solution.

• Unleash a clean energy revolution. Historic investments in smart grid, energy efficiency, and renewable technologies like wind, solar, and biofuels will help unleash a wave of ingenuity and progress that creates jobs, grows our economy, and ends our dependence on oil.
   
• Support advanced vehicle technologies. Record battery grants announced last month are part of a concerted effort to place the U.S. on the cutting edge of advanced vehicle technology, from electric cars to biofuels to advanced combustion.
   
• Drive innovations in health care technology. The President’s health IT initiative is designed to drive technological innovation that will help prevent medical errors, improve health care quality, reduce costs, and cement U.S. leadership of this emerging industry.
   
• Harness science and technology to address the "grand challenges" of the 21st century. The President’s commitment to science and technology will allow the United States to set and meet ambitious goals, such as educational software that is as effective as a personal tutor and smart anti-cancer therapeutics that deliver drugs only to tumor cells.

I –PROBLEMS WITH THE BUBBLE-DRIVEN GROWTH OF THE PAST
A strong economy, but too reliant on precarious, bubble-driven growth, is unsustainable
Despite the American economy’s historic strength, our economic growth has rested for too long on an unstable foundation. Explosive growth in one sector of the economy has provided a short-term boost while masking long-term weaknesses. In the 1990s, the technology sector climbed to new heights. The tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index rose over 650 percent between 1995 and 2000, but then lost two-thirds of its value in a single year, triggering a painful recession.
After the tech bubble burst, a new one emerged in the housing and financial sectors. During the course of the decade, the formula for buying a house changed: instead of saving to buy their dream house, many Americans found they could take out loans that by traditional standards their incomes could not support. The financial sector willingly propped up real estate prices, funneling money into real estate and finding innovative ways to spread the credit risk throughout the economy. From 2000 through 2006, house prices doubled while the financial sector grew to account for fully 40 percent of all corporate profits.
This too proved to be unsustainable. House prices lost a quarter of their value in two and a half years. The housing decline and accompanying stock market collapse wiped out over $13 trillion in wealth in 18 months. The bursting of the bubble based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, over-leveraged banks, and overvalued assets wreaked havoc on the real economy, triggering what is expected to be the longest and deepest recession since World War II and driving the unemployment rate to its highest level in a quarter century.
This type of growth isn’t just problematic when the bubble bursts, it is not entirely healthy even while it lasts. Between 2000 and 2007 the typical working-age household saw their income decline by nearly $2,000. As middle-class incomes sank, the incomes of the top one percent skyrocketed. This phenomenon has a number of causes, but among them were the rising asset prices and the proliferation of financial sector profits.
A short-term focus has neglected essential fundamental investments
A short-term view of the economy masks underinvestments in essential drivers of sustainable, broadly-shared growth. It promotes temporary fixes over lasting solutions. This is patently clear when looking at how education, infrastructure, healthcare, energy, and research – all pillars of lasting prosperity – were ignored during the last bubble.
Too many children are not getting the world class education they deserve and need to thrive in this new innovative economy.

• Despite research documenting that quality matters greatly in early childhood education settings and that investments in high-quality early learning have the highest potential rates of return, the Federal government lacks the level of investment needed to transform the quality of, and enhance access to, early education for our youngest children. Studies show a school readiness gap as early as kindergarten –and as wide as 60 points –between children from the highest socio-economic background and their less affluent peers.
   
• We have neglected to provide our children with the rigorous curriculum and instruction needed to prepare them for college and career. By the end of high school, African American and Latino students have math and reading skills equivalent to those of 8th grade white students. Across the nation, the students with the greatest need for a qualified and effective teacher are also exactly those students most likely to be taught by teachers who lack sufficient background in the subject they teach.
   
• The problems persist when students look toward continuing their education past high school. The average tuition and fees at public, four-year institutions rose 26 percent between the 2000-2001 school year and the 2008-2009 school year. As a result, while 94 percent of high school students in the top quintile of socioeconomic status continue on to post-secondary education, barely half of those in the bottom quintile do so.
   
• Given rising costs of four-year institutions, many Americans are turning to community colleges for quality higher education. Yet the Federal government has historically under-invested in community colleges, giving them one-third the level of support per full-time equivalent student that it gives to public four-year colleges.
   

Our physical and technological infrastructure has been neglected, threatening the ability of American businesses to compete with the rest of the world.

• The American Society of Civil Engineers grades our country’s physical infrastructure as a "D." In 2007, drivers on our clogged highways and streets experienced over 4.2 billion hours of delay and wasted 2.8 billion gallons of fuel.
   
• The United States once led the world in broadband deployment, but now that leadership is in question. Wireless networks in many countries abroad are faster and more advanced than our own.
   
• Our electrical grid is still constructed around the same model employed immediately after World War II. Power interruptions and outages cost American individuals and businesses at least $80 billion each year.

Health care costs have been allowed to spiral out of control, squeezing individuals and businesses at a time when they are feeling pressure on all sides.

• Since 2000, health insurance premiums have increased about 60 percent, 20 times faster than the average worker’s wage.
   
• At the same time, the number of uninsured Americans has jumped by 7 million to 46 million.
   
• Overall, healthcare is consuming an increasing amount of our Nation’s resources. In 1970, healthcare expenditures were 7 percent of GDP; now they are 16 percent of GDP; at this rate they will hit 20 percent of GDP by 2017.
   

Our economy has remained dependent on fossil fuels, exposing consumers and businesses to harmful price shocks, threatening our economic and national security, and resulting in a missed opportunity to lead the clean energy economy of the future.

• Between 1999 and 2004, the production tax credit for renewable energy was allowed to expire on three separate occasions. In each subsequent year (2000, 2003, and 2004) new wind capacity additions in the U.S. fell by more than 75 percent from the year before.
   
• Instead of focusing on finding ever more fossil fuels, other countries made aggressive investments in renewable energy, creating jobs and growing domestic energy sources.
   

Furthermore, we have compounded the problem by ignoring essential investments in high-technology research that will drive future growth.

• Over the last four decades, Federal funding for the physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences has declined by half as a percent of GDP (from 0.25 percent to 0.13 percent) while other countries have substantially increased their research budgets.

Despite this underinvestment in key drivers of growth, the American economy remains the most dynamic, innovative, and resilient in the world. We still have world-class research universities, flexible labor markets, deep capital markets, and an energetic entrepreneurial culture. Americans are twice as likely as adults in Europe and Japan to start a business with the intention of growing it rapidly. We must redouble our efforts to give our world-leading innovators every chance to succeed. We cannot rest on our laurels while other countries catch up.
II –A VISION FOR INNOVATION, GROWTH, AND JOBS
Innovation is Necessary to Fuel Our Recovery
Amidst the worst recession since the great depression, the Administration’s initial economic objective has been to rescue our economy. We have taken – and will continue to take – bold and aggressive steps to stabilize the financial system, jumpstart job growth, and get credit flowing again.
But as the economy begins to stabilize, we must move on from rescue to recovery. Reflecting on the lessons of the past, we must rebuild a new foundation for durable, sustainable economic growth.
Innovation and investment must be a pillar of this new foundation. The basis of competition and the nature of the economy have changed, and we must change with them. Twenty years ago, the United States was losing domestic manufacturing firms and was competing with other countries to sell its goods. Now, manufacturing and services have merged, knowledge is a key factor of production, and services we thought could only be provided in particular countries are available anywhere. We need new ideas to provide Americans with new jobs, new services that take advantage of our globally interconnected world, and new skills that improve our manufacturing capabilities (See Box 1). Other countries understand that innovation is fundamental to their economic well-being and are finding new ways to advance their innovation agendas. We can be even more ambitious, even more successful, and even more focused on building the essential sidewalks of innovation.
Box 1. The Importance of a National Innovation Strategy
Fundamentally, innovation is the development of new products, services, and processes. In our increasingly interconnected and globally competitive world economy, unleashing innovation is an essential component of a comprehensive economic strategy. As global competition erodes the return to traditional practices, the key to developing more jobs and more prosperity will be to create and deploy new products and processes. Put another way, the greatest job and value creators of the future will be activities, jobs, and even industries that don’t exist yet today. The countries that catalyze their development will reap the greatest rewards.
Innovation is essential for creating new jobs in both high-tech and traditional sectors. In recent years, innovation has led to new jobs in high-tech and advanced manufacturing sectors as diverse as aerospace, nanotechnology, life sciences, and alternative energy. At the same time, innovations ripple through the economy, creating jobs for workers installing broadband networks, manufacturing biopharmaceuticals, and building advanced infrastructure.
A more innovative economy is a more productive and faster growing economy, with higher returns to workers and increases in living standards. America’s average standard of living will double every 23 years if innovation catalyzes annual productivity growth of three percent, but it will take 70 years if productivity growth is only one percent. Currently, the U.S. enjoys a significant productivity advantage: one study calculates that the average productivity advantage of the United States over all other OECD countries as a group accounted for a full three quarters of the per capita income advantage the U.S. enjoys. Continued innovation in products, business practices, and technology is essential for extending our productivity gains.
Innovation is also crucial for maintaining the dynamism and resilience of our economy. Future challenges are impossible to predict, but what is certain is that an economy better able to switch gears, innovate solutions, and re-deploy old activities, jobs, and industries will be least susceptible to adversity.
Finally, innovation is itself the key to meeting some of the greatest challenges facing our nation and the world. It will be pivotal to ending our dependence on fossil fuels, helping Americans live longer, healthier lives, and protecting our freedom and our troops both at home and abroad.
Innovation is the key to global competitiveness, new and better jobs, a resilient economy, and the attainment of essential national goals. A strategy is clearly needed to direct our government’s funding and regulatory decisions in order to capture the innovation opportunity.
Our Vision for American Innovation
Our vision of America’s future is one where prosperity is built by skilled, productive workers and sound investments that will spread opportunity at home and allow this nation to lead the world in the technologies, innovation and discoveries that will shape the 21st century.
Innovation will create new jobs and catalyze broadly shared economic growth. The lives of every American will improve as innovations diffuse and scale throughout the economy, leading to breakthroughs in health, education, energy, transportation, information, and much more. We can set and meet grand challenges such as developing solar cells as cheap as paint, building anti-cancer drugs that spare healthy cells, and fitting the contents of the library of congress on a device the size of a sugar cube.
Sustained innovation will drive a dynamic evolution in the nation’s workforce towards better paying jobs. American workers will continue to lead across a broad range of industries and sectors old and new, and will prosper accordingly. Workers making innovation-induced shifts to new jobs within and across industries will receive the transition and training support necessary to ensure no one is left behind.
The American economy is and will remain highly diversified. To a large extent these jobs of the future will be spread across major industries in a similar distribution to today’s economy. As the Council of Economic Advisors described in a July report, one forecast that uses the most recent data available to project employment growth finds that the distribution of jobs across industries in the economy of 2020 will strongly resemble the distribution of 2008. Health and education services will see the most significant growth, while there will be proportionally fewer jobs in business and financial services as well as retail trade, in part because the growth in consumer spending is expected to slow. But by and large the picture is similar to today.
Of course, such forecasts are necessarily imperfect. They cannot capture the growth in industries that may not yet exist. For example, in the late 1980s there were no models that predicted the rapid growth of Internet-based information and computing services that now employ several million workers. Innovation in this sector –initially catalyzed and continuously supported by government investment –has made key contributions to our economy. Some experts estimate that the Internet adds as much as $2 trillion to annual GDP, over $6,500 per person.
Box 2. The Transformation of the Semi-Conductor Industry
In the 1980s, the U.S. semiconductor industry lost its market share to Japanese competitors. But then it innovated its way back, replacing the old jobs in the dynamic-random-access-memory (DRAM) business with jobs producing microprocessors, digital signal processors, microcontrollers, and automotive semiconductors. Companies like Intel, Texas Instruments, and Motorola invested and succeeded, creating better jobs for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Throughout this shift to higher-value-added jobs, the total number of U.S. jobs in the industry held constant.
Another shortcoming of these models is that they fail to capture many of the most important innovations and developments occurring in sub-industries. Yet the U.S. has a history of innovating towards higher-wage jobs within industries. The experience of industries as diverse as semi-conductors and boatbuilding illustrate this point amply (see Boxes 2 and 3).
We see an American future where this process of innovation in next-generation technologies and business ideas becomes pervasive, diffusing throughout the economy and generating better jobs and improved lives for all Americans. It is imperative that we turn this vision into a reality.
Box 3. Boat Builders along Maine’s Eastern Coast
The Maine boat building industry is an example where innovation-led transformations occur on a smaller, more local scale. Maine boat builders have a 400-year heritage of skilled craftsmanship, but technological change was threatening to leave them behind. Instead, the boat builders have enthusiastically embraced cutting edge innovation in advanced composite technologies, replacing old jobs with better jobs in the same industry. Today, the Maine boat building industry produces a highly regarded product line that includes racing yachts, pleasure craft, workboats, and military vessels. As a result, wages in Maine’s boat building industry have risen 19 in percent in real terms over the last decade while employment has risen 12 percent.
III –THE APPROPRIATE ROLE FOR GOVERNMENT
Framework for Government Involvement
While it is clear that a new foundation for innovation and growth is needed, the appropriate framework for government involvement is still debated. Some claim that the laissez-faire policies of the last decade approach the right strategy, and that the recent crisis was the result of too much rather than too little government support. This view calls for cutting government regulation and gutting public programs, hoping the market will take care of the rest.
However, the recent crisis illustrates that the free market itself does not promote the long-term benefit of society, and that certain fundamental investments and regulations are necessary to promote the social good. This is particularly true in the case of investments for research and development, where knowledge spillovers and other externalities ensure that the private sector will under-invest –especially in the most basic of research.
Another view is that the government must dominate certain sectors, protecting and insulating those areas thought to be drivers of future growth. This view calls for massive, sustained government investment supported by stringent oversight, dictating the type and direction of both public and private investments through mandates and bans.
But historical experience in this country and others clearly indicates that governments who try to pick winners and drive growth too often end up wasting resources and stifling rather than promoting innovation. This is in part due to the limited ability of the government to predict the future, but also because such exercises are distorted by lobbyists and rent seekers, which are more likely to favor backward looking industries than forward looking ones. In the United States such failures at picking winners and losers includes most prominently the Synthetic Fuel Corporation, a $20 billion Federal project in the 1980s that failed to provide the promised alternative to oil.
Therefore, we reject both sides of this unproductive and anachronistic debate. The true choice in innovation is not between government and no government, but about the right type of government involvement in support of innovation. A modern, practical approach recognizes both the need for fundamental support and the hazards of overzealous government intervention. The government should make sure individuals and businesses have the tools and support to take risks and innovate, but should not dictate what risks they take.
We propose to strike a balance by investing in the building blocks that only the government can provide, setting an open and competitive environment for businesses and individuals to experiment and grow, and by providing extra catalysts to jumpstart innovation in sectors of national importance. In this way, we will harness the inherent ingenuity of the American people and a dynamic private sector to generate innovations that help ensure the next expansion is more solid, broad-based, and beneficial than previous ones.
Examples of Successful Innovation Programs
We have been successful in the past, and we can be successful in the future. Take the example of DARPA, the historically innovative central research and development organization of the Defense Department. DARPA is tasked with maintaining U.S. technological superiority, and has a history of creating new industries in information technology and advanced manufacturing (see Box 4).
Box 4. DARPA’s Successful Innovations
Thirty years ago, DARPA supported the creation of the internet’s predecessor, ARPANET, despite discouragement from the private sector. Today, over 1.6 billion people use the Internet. DARPA’s innovative research has created entirely new capabilities for the U.S. military such as stealth aircraft, GPS, the M-16 assault rifle, and night vision goggles. It has provided the foundation for new industries like optical networking, supercomputers, and design tools for computer chips. DARPA’s commitment to high-risk, high-return research will help ensure America is prepared to meet the 21st century’s national defense challenges while also catalyzing breakthroughs in technological innovations that will create new industries and improve people’s lives.
Government support has also helped push America to the cutting edge in emerging fields such as nanotechnology, which involves engineering materials and devices on the atomic and molecular level (see Box 5).
The Administration is committed to strengthening and focusing investments in our world-class nanotechnology research and development pipeline; targeting support for nanotechnology transfer and facilitating commercial start-ups; and cross-disciplinary training and education of scientists and engineers in the new-generation workforce. This will enable us to capitalize on our investments and stay at the cutting edge of this rapidly growing technology.
This pattern of government support driving innovations that improve lives and catalyze industries is pervasive. Of the 88 U.S. entities that received "R&D 100 Awards" as the nation’s best innovations in 2006, 77 had received government support. We must build on this record of successful support to build a new foundation for innovation and growth.
Box 5. The Growing Fields of Nanotechnology and Personalized Medicine
A nanometer is a billionth of a meter – or one hundred thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Nanotechnology promises to transform multiple industries: capturing and storing clean energy, developing next-generation computer chips, early detection of diseases, smart anti-cancer therapeutics that deliver drugs only to tumor cells, and enabling all-new approaches to a wide range of manufacturing activities, among many other examples. While the commercial impact of nanotechnology to date has been limited primarily to nanomaterials applied to a range of consumer goods from healthcare and food products to textiles, automotive composites and industrial coatings, nanotechnology innovation is beginning to accelerate. The ten-year history of U.S. leadership in fundamental nanotechnology research and development under the National Nanotechnology Initiative has laid the crucial groundwork for developing commercial applications and scaling up production, creating demand for many new nanotechnology and manufacturing jobs in the near-term.
Nanotechnology is being applied in the developing medical engineering and personalized medicine industries. The practice of tailoring medical treatment to an individual’s unique genetic make-up makes not only treatment, but early detection and prevention, more effective. It also reduces medical costs in cases where expensive treatments are unnecessary or futile. Researchers are currently experimenting with nanotechnology to develop drugs capable of targeting a disease without triggering the body’s natural immune response.
The federal government’s support has been essential in the development of this technology and this industry. The NIH, a major supporter of medical research, saw its budget increase 163% from 1993 to 2003 before stagnating until this year. President Obama has reversed the recent trend with $10 billion in additional NIH funding in the Recovery Act and a pledge for more sustained increases going forward. This funding will help these emerging industries flourish.
IV –A STRATEGY FOR AMERICAN INNOVATION
For our communities and for our country to thrive in this new century, we need to harness the spirit of innovation and discovery that has always moved America forward. We must foster innovation that will lead to the technologies of the future – which will in turn lead to the industries and jobs of the future.
President Obama has already taken historic steps to lay the foundation for the innovation economy of the future. In the Recovery Act alone the President committed over $100 billion to support groundbreaking innovation with investments in energy, basic research, education and training, advanced vehicle technology, innovative programs, health IT and health research, high speed rail, smart grid, and information technology (see Figure 1). His commitment also includes broader support in the Recovery Act and in his FY2010 budget on initiatives from education to infrastructure. The President’s commitment is not just limited to more government funding, but extends to important regulatory and executive order initiatives such as patent reform, coordinated fuel efficiency standards, net neutrality, permit policy for offshore wind farms, and naming the first ever Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Government.
Figure 1. Innovation Funding in the Recovery Act

These investments and initiatives are part of The Obama Innovation Strategy, which focuses on critical areas where sensible, balanced government policies can lay the foundation for innovation that leads to quality jobs and shared prosperity. It has three parts:
1. Invest in the Building Blocks of American Innovation. We must first ensure that our economy is given all the necessary tools for successful innovation, from investments in research and development to the human, physical, and technological capital needed to perform that research and transfer those innovations.
2. Promote Competitive Markets that Spur Productive Entrepreneurship. It is imperative to create a national environment ripe for entrepreneurship and risk taking that allows U.S. companies to be internationally competitive in a global exchange of ideas and innovation. Through competitive markets, innovations diffuse and scale appropriately across industries and globally.
3. Catalyze Breakthroughs for National Priorities. There are certain sectors of exceptional national importance where the market is unlikely to produce the desirable outcomes on its own. These include developing alternative energy sources, reducing costs and improving lives with health IT, and manufacturing advanced vehicles. In these industries where markets may fail on their own, government can be part of the solution.
1. INVEST IN THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF AMERICAN INNOVATION
A. Restore American Leadership in Fundamental Research
President Obama recognizes the fundamental role of government in fostering groundbreaking scientific and technological breakthroughs, and has committed resources and energy to ensure America leads the world in the innovations of the future.

• Enact the Largest R&D increase in our nation’s history. With $18.3 billion in research funding, the Recovery Act is part of the largest annual increase in research and development in America’s history.
   
• Double the R&D budget of key science agencies. The President’s Budget proposed to double the research budgets of three key science agencies: the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. These investments will expand the frontiers of human knowledge and create the foundation for the industries and jobs of the future, such as the convergence of bio, info, and nanotechnologies. The Obama Administration will increase the impact of this investment by providing more support for high-risk, high-return research, for multidisciplinary research, and for scientists and engineers at the beginning of their careers.
   
• Invest three percent of GDP in R&D. The President has proposed a goal that as a country, we invest more than three percent of our GDP in public and private research and development. This will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race.
   
• Make the R&E tax credit permanent. The President’s Budget includes the full $75 billion cost of making the research and experimentation tax credit permanent. This will provide businesses with the greater confidence they need to invest, innovate, and grow.

B. Educate the Next Generation with 21st Century Knowledge and Skills While Creating a World-Class Workforce
America's high levels of education were an important contributor to rising living standards in recent years. For America to continue to lead the world in science and technology innovation, it must have the most knowledgeable and skilled workers in the world.

• Reform public schools to deliver a complete and competitive education. The President is committed to an education system that will prepare every child for success in a new, global economy. The Obama Administration is supporting the improvement of teaching and learning to ensure that students master world-class knowledge and critical skills for the 21st century; enhance and reward success in the teaching profession; drive innovation in America’s classrooms; and expand successful models to improve outcomes for middle- and high-school students. The President’s Race to the Top in America’s schools will deliver a historic investment and challenge the states to design and enforce higher and clearer standards, attract and keep outstanding teachers in the classroom, and use effective approaches to turn America’s lowest-performing schools around.
   
• Restore America to first in the world in college graduates. Colleges, universities, and their students are bedrocks of American innovation. President Obama has called for restoring America to first in the world in the proportion of college graduates by 2020. Between the Recovery Act and the 2010 budget, the Administration is seeking nearly $200 billion over the next decade for scholarships and tax credits to help students complete college. The Obama Administration is investing in innovative strategies to support college persistence, simplify the student aid application and reform the student loan program to shift billions in wasteful spending toward greater help for students to reach and complete college. The Administration has been actively working with Congress to fund these priorities by eliminating waste in the student aid program.
   
• Improve America’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education. STEM education is particularly important to America’s future scientific progress and economic growth. As part of his effort to promote innovation in K-12 education, the President has challenged governors, philanthropists, scientists, engineers, educators and the private sector to join with him to dramatically improve achievement in STEM subjects. The President’s Race to the Top fund aims to reinvigorate the teaching of STEM in America’s classrooms and support advanced learning in these subjects, especially for women, girls and other underrepresented groups. The President is also committed to using the $4 billion Race to the Top fund to encourage states to put STEM at the center of their reform efforts. Finally, the Recovery Act provided a down payment toward the goal of tripling the number of NSF Graduate Research Fellowships in science and engineering.
   
• Develop new career pathways in community college programs. Given the innovation and advances coming in future years, jobs requiring at least an associate’s degree are projected to grow twice as fast as those requiring no college experience. President Obama has proposed the American Graduation Initiative to produce 5 million more community college graduates by 2020, a key part of his college completion goal. The initiative would invest in promising reforms to raise graduation rates, tie courses to business needs, improve remedial education and strengthen transitions with high schools and four-year colleges. It would also leverage $10 billion in facilities modernization and repairs amongst other projects.
   
• Design world-class online courses for post-secondary students. The President is proposing to invest up to $500 million over the next 10 years to create world-class online courses available at community colleges for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. These courses will be freely available, and enable students to extend learning opportunities and successfully complete their course work. Colleges, universities, publishers, and other groups will be invited to compete to create state-of-the-art online courses that combine high-quality subject matter expertise with the latest advances in cognitive and computer sciences.