The 96 minutes it took the Sputnik satellite to orbit the Earth in October, 1957 fundamentally transformed education, science and global politics in the United States. One result was the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, which vastly increased federal spending on science and technology education. The 104 minutes it took for the World Trade towers to collapse provoked a similar transformation in the way that the United States thinks about homeland security. The federal government’s major educational initiative this time, however, is far less ambitious. What’s more, its future is uncertain – partly because of Congress’s impatience with the department’s overall lack of focus and efficiency.
The amount of money devoted to “space race” education spending 50 years ago was considerable – $1 billion, the equivalent of $7 billion today. The funding had a vast impact on the development of the missile and computer technologies that led to the moon landing in 1969; the space program, in turn, has been credited with spurring many technological advances that have since been realized.
The educational ripple effects were huge. The NDEA offered “defense fellowships” to bolster graduate science programs across the country. Partly as a result, the number of Ph.D.s awarded annually by U.S. colleges and universities rose to 34,000 in 1973 from 8,600 in 1957, according to the National Opinion Research Center.
A half-century later, the funds that the United States has committed to homeland security-related education and the goals of the project are much more modest. Although other governmental entities like the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation have related educational initiatives, within the Department of Homeland Security direct educational funding was a paltry $70 million in 2004.
DHS’s University Fellows and Scholars Program has awarded grants to more than 300 college and graduate students since 2004, with the hope that the recipients will later work in homeland security fields. Most recipients come from the hard sciences and engineering, though the fellowship also supports students with interests in social sciences and policy.
DHS has also created “Centers of Excellence” – university-based research consortiums that study threats ranging from agricultural terrorism to the behavioral aspects of terrorists and their victims. The University of Southern California received the first of such three-year grant in 2003 for $12 million, which it is in the process of renewing. Since then, five other schools have received a combined $82 million in grants.
But Congress continues to cut funding for educational programs, to $51 million in 2007 from $70 million is 2004, partly because it questions how well – or even if – the money allocated so far has been spent. The fellowship program, for instance, faces an uncertain future: Amy Scott, senior federal relations officer at the Association of American Universities, which represents 60 leading U.S. universities, said that DHS has decided to suspend next year’s competition.
Christopher Kelly, a spokesman for DHS, wrote in an email that because the department had yet to receive its appropriation budget for 2007, “it would be inappropriate to speculate on plans for the next academic year.”
He declined to comment on whether the AAU’s assertion was true.
Most DHS fellows – who receive free tuition at the college or graduate school they attend, plus a monthly stipend – are still in school. Though the department plans to track their future careers, little data is yet available on their progress. To get a quick look at the program’s practical effects, News21 interviewed several recent recipients.
Some DHS fellows say they plan careers in the government. Kate Phillips, 25, from Centerville, Virginia, studied molecular biology at Princeton. After graduating, she worked at a think tank in Washington, D.C., researching chemical- and biological-weapons proliferation, which led her to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she is pursuing a master’s in strategic studies. This summer, she’s interning at the University of Southern California’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, a research center funded by DHS. “A lot of people wonder how I ended up in strategic studies from chemical and biological weapons,” she said. “My ultimate goal is to work in the policy-making world, at DHS or the Department of Defense.”
Other fellows are heading for the private sector. Joshua Brock Thomas, 26, who is completing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, applied for the fellowship during the height of the SARS outbreak in 2003, and focused his essay on oral therapeutics – the rapid distribution of vaccines in the event of a pandemic. Since then, his research has focused on pharmaceutical issues, and in the fall, he will begin working at the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tenn. Although he won’t be working for the government, Thomas believes one of the missions of DHS is to heighten awareness of homeland security issues. “I may not be doing exactly what they had in mind, but they have trained someone to think about homeland security,” he said.
A look back at the Sputnik-era spending spree shows how targeted educational grants can result in unanticipated societal benefits. Vern Reinhold, 75, is a professor of biochemistry at the University of New Hampshire. The son of an immigrant dairy farmer who disapproved of higher education, Reinhold said he would not have gone to graduate school had he not received a “national defense” fellowship in 1960. With the scholarship, however, he pursued a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Vermont and went on to teach at the Harvard Medical School for 25 years. “It made a huge difference in my life,” he said.
The DHS’s modest educational programs seem like a promising way to improve homeland security over the long term, and may make a major impact in the lives of many current students. The challenge for the department is to make sure they are run efficiently, and that they survive the bureaucratic mayhem that continues at the DHS and in the congressional committees that oversee it.
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