US vs. Chinese Engineers (and a Kurzweil Interview)

Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit.com has an email interview with Ray Kurzweil that is interesting. But at the bottom of it are some even more interesting graphs of US vs. China (and Asia) Engineering and Science students. Now, I really don't care about the ratio of US vs. Chinese engineers, because I don't think this is a zero sum game, but seeing the number of US students actually going down is very concerning.

What accounts for this? Here is one take, that is pretty close to my experience.