In an initiative called the Invest in America Alliance, Intel and 24 venture capital firms plan to invest $3.5 billion in American start-ups over the next two years.

In addition, Intel, Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and 13 other employers pledged to add jobs in 2010, by hiring 10,500 graduates of American colleges, largely those with computer science and engineering degrees.

Fewer than 10 percent of college graduates in the United States have engineering degrees, compared with more than one-third in India and China, and patent filings increased 30 percent in China last year, while declining 11 percent in the United States.