It’s really difficult to come up with new ways to frame crisis stories about the dwindling number of science majors in the US, but people keep finding them. The latest is from Marc Zimmer writing in Inside Higher Ed, who makes a number of biology analogies:
The numbers indicate that the American scientist population is not healthy, especially not in comparison to scientists in other countries. This will impact America’s ability to retain its place in the global (scientific and technological) food chain. What could be responsible for this decline? My money is on the changing habitat of the American scientist , climate change, and the introduction of exotic species.
Zimmer is a chemist, so he will undoubtedly offend some humorless bio dorks by misusing one or another of those terms in slightly strained analogies (“climate change” for example, refers to, more or less, the War On Science). But at least it’s a faintly novel way of framing the issue.
There’s really nothing new other than that, though. It’s mostly, as the first commenter notes, the same old same old arguments.