The numbers are jarring, but Dr. James R. Martin II, chancellor of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, wants Americans to sit with them: If the United States had closed its racial and gender equity gaps in education and workforce participation back in 2000, the country would have added an estimated $15 to $20 trillion to its economy.
Today, drawing fully on the talents of underrepresented populations — Black and Hispanic Americans, women, and others locked out of high-skill industries — could generate up to $2 trillion per year. Those numbers, Martin argues, are the main thesis of a national security briefing that no one in power seems to be reading.
“For us to be the best country we can be — and we’re getting our butts kicked right now by China,” Martin said in a recent interview with The EDU Ledger, “[the U.S. needs to] draw on the full capacity of our country.”
The math, as Martin lays it out, is as straightforward as it is alarming. China produces four times the STEM graduates the United States does. Mexico, because so much American manufacturing was offshored there over the decades, now graduates engineers at a rate of 24 to 25 percent of its total degree-holders annually. The United States, which invented the modern research university and the innovation ecosystem that powered the 20th century, sits below 10 percent. And in the middle of this quietly accelerating race, the U.S. is cutting the budget of the National Science Foundation.
“If somebody’s got a bigger national economy than you, forget about winning a national security battle,” Martin said.
“We have become so centric about the United States that we’re not looking around,” he continued. “The rest of the world is moving on, and we are just divesting. We should be doing the opposite, because we invented innovation, we invented STEM. We invented this type of ecosystem.”
What makes this moment particularly acute is not merely that the country is falling behind — it is that it is falling behind while voluntarily leaving half its workforce on the bench. Roughly 50 percent of the U.S. population, Martin notes, remains underrepresented in high-skill, high-wage industries. Those workers, when they are shut out of the economic engine, do not simply disappear from the ledger.
