"Into the Eye of the Storm"

Subtitle: "Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand"
B. Lindsay Lowell and Harold Salzman, Urban Institute, October 29, 2007.

Abstract: "Recent policy reports claim the United States is falling behind other nations in science and math education and graduating insufficient numbers of scientists and engineers. Review of the evidence and analysis of actual graduation rates and workforce needs does not find support for these claims. U.S. student performance rankings are comparable to other leading nations and colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Instead, the evidence suggests targeted education improvements are needed for the lowest performers and demand-side factors may be insufficient to attract qualified college graduates."

SSTI Weekly Digest comments:

As a whole, the numbers of S&E Ph.D. graduates are continuing to escalate, as reported in an InfoBrief recently released by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It states U.S. institutions of higher education awarded 29,854 S&E doctorates in 2006, a 6.7 percent increase over 2005, resulting in a 9.6 percent increase over a 10-year period. Additionally, women attained 8.8 percent of the S&E doctorates in 2006. Non-U.S. citizens received 45.2 percent of Ph.D.s in the S&E fields.

The possible excessive supply of Ph.D. students was illustrated in an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “The Real Science Crisis: Bleak Prospects for Young Researchers,” Richard Monastersky reports that the academic job market in science is changing faster than graduate programs can accommodate. For many Ph.D.s in the sciences, professors are having a harder time obtaining grants, and postdocs are struggling to obtain tenure-track jobs. The story cites external data describing how 70 percent of physics Ph.D.s become temporary postdocs today, compared to 42 percent in 2000. Additionally, even though the number of doctorates in biomedicine has nearly doubled in the last two decades, the number of tenured and tenure-track positions have not increased in that same period.

Comment: This is rather comforting, indicating we will have scientifically and technologically trained people to fill our jobs, although there may be disjunctions hidden in the figures; a civil engineer is not much use in a biotech lab and a microbiologist can't design a bridge.

I also think it useful to have significant numbers of S&T trained people in management, government, and other jobs. JAD