Editor's note: Anthony Moretti is an associate professor at the Department of Communication and Organizational Leadership of Robert Morris University. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.

A new study from Georgetown University will certainly add to the fear about China throughout the U.S. The reason for the anxiety this time: PhD graduates.

You read that correctly: People earning doctoral degrees, specifically doctoral degrees in STEM fields.

According to the authors, "... by 2025 Chinese universities will produce more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year compared to approximately 40,000 in the United States. If international students are excluded from the U.S. count, Chinese STEM PhD graduates would outnumber their U.S. counterparts more than three-to-one."

One can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth throughout the media and political elite: China is going to drown America ... in doctoral degrees in the critically important areas of science, technology, engineering and math.

Those panic attacks will only intensify once the elites read deeper into the report. There, they will find the authors complimenting the improvement in the overall quality of doctoral education in China. They use the important measure of the number of STEM-related publications in top-notch academic journals to state "China-based authors are producing an increasingly large share of top STEM publications (defined as the top one percent of cited articles), already exceeding that of U.S.-based authors in certain disciplines, including several subfields of artificial intelligence."

Publications – especially in the most elite journals – remain essential for university professors to increase their stature domestically and internationally. With that name recognition, they will find more doors opening to more elaborate research possibilities and with increased potential for funding their research through governmental, non-profit and foundational agencies.

In addition, the better versed these faculty are in some facet of the complex world of STEM, the better the instruction they will provide students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

When you put it all together, what does it mean? Combine more Chinese men and women earning doctoral degrees in the STEM fields with the heightened stature of China's doctoral education and elite publications, and it becomes impossible for Western critics to question the integrity of the doctoral education throughout China.

What is happening in China is no accident. Remember that over the past couple of decades – while America has been engaging in seemingly never-ending wars and wasting trillions of dollars in the process – China has been investing intentionally in making its nation stronger. Enhancing education, most notably at the university level, is one of the shining examples in this effort.

Consider this statement from the Georgetown report: "The Chinese Ministry of Education roughly doubled its spending on higher education between 2012 and 2021, fueling an increase in new PhD enrollments." To borrow a cliché, the proof of this commitment is in the pudding: Right now, seven of the top 100 universities around the world are located on the Chinese mainland and another three can be found in Hong Kong. We should anticipate more Chinese institutions will appear in the top 100 in the years to come.

We also should clearly see in the near future more and more Chinese scholars choosing to remain at home, knowing the education they receive will put them on par with their Western colleagues. And that means the gap between China and the U.S. in STEM-related doctoral degrees ought to continue to expand.

The Georgetown report recognizes this and states "... because more than three-quarters of Chinese doctoral graduates specialize in STEM fields, this evidence indicates China's STEM talent pipeline is becoming more robust."

While this affirmation of the necessity of a well-educated populace has been unfolding in China, an often nasty conversation has been taking place in the U.S. It focuses on whether a college education retains any value at all.

Republicans continue to suggest that America's colleges and universities are filled with professors more concerned with indoctrinating students with liberal ideas instead of providing them an education that will set them up for professional success. These corrosive attacks are infecting the thinking of many Americans.

The respected Pew Research Center reported "only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days. About four-in-ten (38%) say they are having a negative impact – up from 26% in 2012.”

Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate engaged in an often hysterical discussion about the array of "threats" China poses to the United States. The knee-jerk reaction was a $250 billion bill called the United States Innovation and Competition Act, which senators from both sides of the political aisle boasted would prevent the U.S. from falling behind China in critical technology areas.

The Senate could have made the U.S. a stronger nation if it had committed billions of dollars to higher education. Those dollars could have been used to educate more students, hire more faculties and address the desperate financial state too many graduates are in once they earn that degree.

Sadly, crying wolf when one was not around generated the headlines the senators wanted. But no person became more educated as a result. 

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