The Boom in Education and Research

Education and research were key to running postindustrial society and had now become the means by which nations maintained their economic and military might. In the West, common sense, hard work, and creative intuition had launched the earliest successes of the Industrial Revolution. By the late twentieth century, a wide variety of expertise and ever-growing staffs of researchers fueled military and industrial leadership. The United States funneled more than 20 percent of its gross national product (a measure of the total value of goods and services a nation produced in a year) into research in the 1960s, attracting many of Europe’s leading intellectuals and technicians to move to the United States in a so-called brain drain. Scientists and bureaucrats frequently made more crucial decisions than did elected politicians in the realm of space programs, weapons development, and economic policy. Here East–West differences became important: Soviet-bloc nations proved less adept at linking their considerable achievements in science to real-life applications because of bureaucratic red tape. In the 1960s, some 40 percent of scientific findings in the Soviet bloc became obsolete before the government approved them for application to technology. An invisible backsliding from superpower effectiveness and leadership had begun in the USSR—much of it due to the lack of systems coordination and cooperation.

The centrality of sophisticated knowledge to success in postindustrial society led to unprecedented growth in education, especially in universities and scientific institutes. The number of university students in Sweden rose by about 580 percent and in West Germany by 250 percent between 1950 and 1969. Great Britain established a network of technical universities to encourage the practical research that traditional elite universities often scorned. France set up schools to train future high-level experts in administration. The scientific establishment in the Soviet Union grew rapidly, and some institutions of higher learning added courses in business management, information technology, and systems analysis designed for the new pool of postindustrial workers.