We absolutely can do it, and have. Post-sputnik, government funding poured into STEM, and we convinced huge amounts of young people that they wanted to be scien

We absolutely can do it, and have. Post-sputnik, government funding poured into STEM, and we convinced huge amounts of young people that they wanted to be scientists and engineers, and nobody was coerced into anything. We trained enough engineers in that short time to staff a literal moonshot program plus every half-baked weapons system idea that crossed a desk anywhere in the Pentagon plus tons of other more speculative stuff like packet switching networks (aka ethernet, the internet, etc.). It's not necessary to dictate any individual person's career in order to shift the numbers in aggregate.