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Scientist Shortage?

An excellent article by Richard Monastersky appears in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education that casts a skeptical look at current claims of a “shortage” of scientists and engineers. Here is an excerpt:

“University presidents, government officials, and heads of industry have joined together in a chorus of concern over the state of science and engineering in the United States. The danger signs are obvious, they say. Fewer U.S. citizens are getting doctorates in those fields. There is increasing competition from other countries for the foreign graduate students who once flocked to the United States. And those changes come when many argue that the United States needs more technically trained people to power its economy. In a report in May, the National Science Board reached the gloomy conclusion that "these trends threaten the economic welfare and security of our country."

But such a lamentation has an all-too familiar ring to some experts, and it strikes them as off-key. In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation warned that the nation would soon lack enough scientists and engineers to fill the necessary posts in academe -- a forecast that turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Instead, over the past decade, thousands of frustrated researchers have labored in postdoctoral positions at low wages because they could not find jobs in academe or industry.

Current data suggest that the new predictions may fare no better than earlier ones. In fact, contrary to prevailing wisdom, which fixes blame on poor training in science and mathematics from kindergarten through the 12th grade, record numbers of Americans are earning bachelor's degrees in science and engineering. And unemployment rates in at least some sectors of science and engineering have topped the charts.”

And also:

“Yet graduate schools have an incentive to train ever-increasing numbers of students and postdoctoral fellows because they perform the work on research grants that bring money into universities … Even the National Academy of Sciences, one of the cornerstones of the establishment, has acknowledged the conflicts of interest involved in this issue. "These forecasts of undersupply that did not materialize have led policy makers for graduate training and research support to be highly skeptical of any forecasts and to worry about the self-interest of the forecasters," concluded the academy in a 2000 report.”

Read the whole story. It provides a good example why aggregate science budgets are not the whole story of U.S. science policy.