These should be heady times for Jim Goodnight, founder and CEO of SAS Institute, a business analytics software and services firm. His North Carolina-based company bucked the economic downturn to make 2009 its third most profitable year on record ­– and it is currently working on cutting-edge solutions for Macy’s and also for the endangered hippos in Africa. But Goodnight, a former statistics professor who launched SAS in 1976, noted that his biggest priority these days is his concern that America isn’t turning out enough new scientists and mathematicians to prevent the flow of jobs and critical research to Asia and elsewhere. “Twenty-first century employers are looking for workers who are proficient in science, technology, engineering and math, but in American schools these are not areas of great interest,” Goodnight said during a lecture sponsored by a longtime SAS-partner, Wharton Research Data Services.…