Lawyers run the world. In most countries of the world, presidents have traditionally been lawyers. Barack Obama is a Harvard lawyer and Biden earned a bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in history and political science. In Mexico, the president who is about to leave is a lawyer and so is the president who is about to take office. Where are the engineers?

There is one country in the world where engineers decide the direction of the nation: China. It strikes me powerfully that the Chinese have long been ruled by engineers. The current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, is a chemical engineer; his predecessor, Hu Jintao, is a hydraulic engineer; and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, is an electrical engineer.

Presumably, if China has been governed by engineers, it is because this area is well accepted, which is true since 72 percent of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students are enrolled in engineering and exact sciences, while the remaining 28 percent study subjects related to social sciences and humanities. These figures undoubtedly astonish those of us who live in countries where engineers are in the minority.

In times of economic crisis, China remains relatively stable; I do not mean to say that engineers govern better, but in many countries around the world a change would not be a bad thing. What do you think, should we study the Chinese educational model in more depth to understand why engineering is the choice of most students?