Securing America's Future: A Renewed National STEM Workforce Strategy

The United States is facing a chronic STEM workforce crisis — a result of decades of complacency and insufficient funding — that is set to damage our country’s competitiveness and economic prosperity.

We face challenges at all levels, as evidenced by:

• a growing STEM teacher shortage that fails to meet the needs of millions of American K-12 students;
• a departure of hundreds of thousands of undergraduate STEM majors from their degrees and STEM career path before graduation; and
• a significant nationwide shortage of advanced degree-holding STEM talent.

We’ve been here before, and we know the solution: a national strategy, with full support and dedicated funding from the federal government, that will deliver the STEM workforce required for the United States to remain a global leader today and for decades to come.

Achieving this goal requires the following components be included in any national STEM workforce strategy:

1. Expand an improved NSF Noyce program to at least ten times its current annual budget.
   This will directly grow the STEM K-12 teaching workforce and enable millions of currently excluded American K-12 students access to high quality STEM classes — the first step in joining the U.S. STEM workforce at all levels, from trade-professionals and technicians to PhD researchers and industry leaders.
2. Support 200,000 research opportunities annually for undergraduate STEM majors at their home institutions.
   This will directly increase the retention of hundreds of thousands of talented students in STEM majors over time, and deliver much-needed domestic STEM workers into the U.S. economy.
3. Provide a fivefold increase to the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
   This will directly grow the next generation of high-skilled domestic STEM PhD workers.
4. Reform the F-1 student visa for graduate students to allow for dual-intent and guarantee a pathway to residency for advanced-degree earners from U.S. universities that secure job offers from U.S. organizations.
   This will directly restore our country as the premiere destination of global talent through intentional STEM visa and immigration policies that encourage the world’s best and brightest to pursue their graduate education in the United States and stay here for a successful career.