#1 on the Internet; #12 in Higher Education

July 26, 2007— -- Opportunity 08 is an ABC News project with the Brookings Institution to help presidential candidates and the public focus on critical issues facing the nation.

This week Opportunity 08 takes a closer look at how the next president can keep America #1 on the Internet.

The producers of this week's CNN/YouTube debate revealed that one of the most popular topics among submitted questions was education. That could turn out to be good news for YouTube.

As the central medium of information technology, the Internet is a fundamentally important driver of economic growth. It underpins software and hardware market opportunities, and it enables a far broader set of industries to create new markets and to increase productivity and profitability.

And from YouTube to Google to Yahoo, the face of the Internet is largely American.

But will it stay that way?

"The United States does not have any special right to be the global leader on the 'net," explains Sean Maloney of the Intel Corporation. "The fact is that we're benefiting from 30, 50, or even 70 years of investment combined with a culture that encourages innovation. But we're not currently on top of our game – and even if we were, other countries would be gaining."

Retaining U.S. leadership will require the next president to follow a well documented path -- investing in basic research and development, welcoming talented immigrants, encouraging expanded Internet availability -- and making science and engineering education a priority.

The United States has fallen to 12th place among major industrialized countries in overall higher educational attainment and 16th in high school graduation rates.

Maloney and his colleague Christopher Thomas argue that it's crucial for the next president to endorse policies that enable American companies to remain the primary inventors and distributors of Internet technology.

That means, they say: recruiting and retaining 10,000 new mathematics and science teachers per year, doubling our annual number of engineering graduates, convincing 1,000 more of the nation's top engineering students to pursue doctoral studies every year, and doubling the number of H1-B visas for highly-skilled foreign workers to meet market demand.