Every two years the National Science Board supervises the collection of a very broad set of data trends in science and technology in the United States, which it publishes as Science and Engineering Indicators. In preparing Indicators 2004, the NSB said, “We have observed a troubling decline in the number of U.S. citizens who are training to become scientists and engineers, whereas the number of jobs requiring science and engineering (S&E) training continues to grow.” These trends threaten the economic welfare and security of our country, it said, adding that if the trends identified in Indicators 2004 continue undeterred, three things will happen: “The number of jobs in the U.S. economy that require science and engineering training will grow; the number of U.S. citizens prepared for those jobs will, at best, be level; and the availability of people from other countries who have science and engineering training will decline, either because of limits to entry imposed by U.S. national security restrictions or because of intense global competition for people with these skills.”
The NSB report found that the number of American eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds who receive science degrees has fallen to seventeenth in the world, whereas we ranked third three decades ago. It said that of the 2.8 million first university degrees (what we call bachelor's degrees) in science and engineering granted worldwide in 2003, 1.2 million were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, 830,000 were granted in Europe, and 400,000 in the United States. In engineering specifically, universities in Asian countries now produce eight times as many bachelor's degrees as the United States.
Moreover, “the proportional emphasis on science and engineering is greater in other nations,” noted Shirley Ann Jackson. Science and engineering degrees now represent 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees earned in China, 33 percent in South Korea, and 41 percent in Taiwan. By contrast, the percentage of those taking a bachelor's degree in science and engineering in the United States remains at roughly 31 percent. Factoring out science degrees, the number of Americans who graduate with just engineering degrees is 5 percent, as compared to 25 percent in Russia and 46 percent in China, according to a 2004 report by Trilogy Publications, which represents the national U.S. engineering professional association.
The United States has always depended on the inventiveness of its people in order to compete in the world marketplace, said the NSB. “Preparation of the S&E workforce is a vital arena for national competitiveness. [But] even if action is taken today to change these trends, the reversal is 10 to 20 years away.” The students entering the science and engineering workforce with advanced degrees in 2004 decided to take the necessary math courses to enable this career path when they were in middle school, up to fourteen years ago, the NSB noted. The students making that same decision in middle school today won't complete advanced training for science and engineering occupations until 2018 or 2020. “If action is not taken now to change these trends, we could reach 2020 and find that the ability of U.S. research and education institutions to regenerate has been damaged and that their preeminence has been lost to other areas of the world,” the science board said.
These shortages could not be happening at a worse time-just when the world is going flat. “The number of jobs requiring science and engineering skills in the U.S. labor force,” the NSB said, “is growing almost 5 percent per year. In comparison, the rest of the labor force is growing at just over 1 percent. Before September 11, 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projected that science and engineering occupations would increase at three times the rate of all occupations.” Unfortunately, the NSB reported, the average age of the science and engineering workforce is rising.
“Many of those who entered the expanding S&E workforce in the 1960s and 1970s (the baby boom generation) are expected to retire in the next twenty years, and their children are not choosing science and engineering careers in the same numbers as their parents,” the NSB report said. “The percentage of women, for example, choosing math and computer science careers fell 4 percentage points between 1993 and 1999.”
The 2002 NSB indicators showed that the number of science and engineering Ph.D.'s awarded in the United States dropped from 29,000 in 1998 to 27,000 in 1999. The total number of engineering undergraduates in America fell about 12 percent between the mid-1980s and 1998.