Tim Ryan: “Natural sciences, engineering. And I am not saying I was the sharpest knife in the drawer when I went through college…”

“Natural sciences, engineering. And I am not saying I was the sharpest knife in the drawer when I went through college, but what I am saying is I know enough and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) knows enough, and I think the American people know enough of what we need to do to compete. So look at this chart. Percentage of first degrees awarded in natural sciences and engineering: China, 73 percent; Japan, 66 percent; Germany, 59 percent; South Korea, 45 percent; United States, 32 percent. So China is at 73 percent. We are at 32 percent. And how do we expect to compete with all these people if we do not have enough people participating in the sciences and in engineering? One final chart. These are people entering graduate school and engineering, physical sciences, math and computer sciences in U.S. institutions. The green line is U.S. students and permanent residents, 59,000, roughly, as I stated earlier. The red line is foreign students at U.S. institutions, almost 83,000. I do not want to get bogged down in the numbers; but my point is that because we are not investing in education, because this administration, this House, this Senate, this Congress, has chosen time and time again to give tax breaks to the top 1 percent while we have 250,000 students across the United States of America who are college eligible but will not go because they cannot afford it, we have a problem. And we have a problem that we can fix, and this is why I am here at almost 11 o'clock at night.”