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Oil is getting attention these days because its price is dramatically affecting many aspects of daily life. No doubt many Americans wish the United States had more oil reserves so it wouldn't have to rely so much on foreign suppliers.

However, few people seem to notice or care that this country is short on something else — people skilled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Like oil, this deficit in human capital portends problems for the United States. Unlike the petroleum problem, which is largely out of American control, the United States can reverse this trend and maintain its worldwide competitiveness.

In a positive step toward that end, Gov. Janet Napolitano announced last week the creation of the Arizona STEM Education Center. STEM stands for science, technology, education and mathematics.

"The new education center will help make certain that Arizona cultivates the skills needed to thrive in today's global marketplace," Napolitano said in a July 15 press release. "Increasing science, technology, engineering and math education is critical to our students' and state's future."

The center, which will be housed within the Science Foundation Arizona offices in downtown Phoenix, intends to increase STEM teacher recruitment, training and retention; improve STEM skills among young students; and boost the number of students who go to college in STEM disciplines.

The center will be funded independently, with private and philanthropic money.

Workers in these critical fields are the innovators of tomorrow. They are the thinkers who will dream up the ideas that will keep the American economy strong and thriving. If they are Arizonans, it's even better.

If the United States isn't able to produce more STEM workers, or doesn't take in the best and brightest from other nations, it could lose ground to countries that do.

On the same day Napolitano announced the STEM center, a group called Tapping America's Potential issued a report saying that the United States is falling behind in efforts to create more college graduates in the STEM fields.

Tapping America's Potential, a coalition of 16 of the nation's leading business organizations, launched a project in 2005 to double the number of students attaining bachelor's degrees in STEM subject areas from 200,000 to 400,000 by 2015.

That effort, however, is proving difficult.

After three years, the number of STEM degrees awarded to undergraduates has only increased by 24,000, to 225,000. At that rate of growth, the 2015 goal of 400,000 seems unattainable.

"The time to act is now, not after we are forced to surrender the mantle as the world's innovation headquarters," Phil Bond, president and CEO of the Information Technology Association of America, said in a Tapping America's Potential press release last week.

Even when American universities award STEM degrees, they often go to foreign students. There's nothing wrong with that, but a tightening of United States immigration policies means that this nation often rejects the students it helps educate. They take their highly sought skills back to their native countries or other nations where they are more welcome.

According to Compete America, a group that supports allowing more highly skilled workers into the United States through the expansion of visa programs, approximately 54 percent of master's degrees awarded in engineering at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona went to foreign students.

Also, about 76 percent of engineering doctorates at the two schools went to foreign nationals.

We see the Arizona STEM center as a positive step in getting more homegrown talent into the fields of innovation. The state and the nation certainly needs them.

While we try to educate Americans, however, the federal government also should increase the number of visas available to highly skilled foreign workers, many of whom are educated at American schools. It makes no sense to create prized workers and then fail to make use of their talents.