Last fall the president of the University of Maryland found himself doing something that none of his predecessors would have dreamed of trying. While on a trip to Taiwan, C. Dan Mote Jr. spent part of his time recruiting Taiwanese students to go to the United States for graduate school.
“Can you imagine an American university president doing that?” he asks.
In 1988 Taiwan sent more students to the United States than did any other foreign country, primarily to study science and engineering. But in the past decade, the flow of talented Taiwanese has started to dry up, and graduate enrollment has declined by 25 percent. “This is a new day we’re experiencing,” says Mr. Mote.
As a former professor of engineering, he is particularly concerned about what the drop portends for the health of science and engineering in the United States. “The circumstances for our decline are definitely in place,” he says, “and we need to do something about the circumstances before this great decline does occur.”
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.
“Despite recurring concerns about potential shortages of STEM [scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics] personnel in the U.S. work force, particularly in engineering and information technology, we did not find evidence that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon,” concluded the RAND Corporation in a report this year.
“Projections about shortages are a dangerous business,” says Paula E. Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University who has tracked employment in science. The inaccuracy of past pronouncements, she says, “creates a woof-woof problem. How many times can you say this and the public will believe it?”
In fact, even as science leaders opined about the alarming NSF report from May, the agency announced last week that graduate-student enrollment in science and engineering actually reached a new peak in 2002. Foreign enrollment set a record and so did first-time enrollment for U.S. citizens. “Overall, the declines in total graduate S&E enrollment from 1994 through 1998 have reversed with gains in enrollment every year since 1999,” according to the foundation.
Given the history of such flip-flops, some observers turn the current concerns on their head and ask whether American academic institutions are training too many scientists and engineers. An editorial in Science this year argued: “We’ve arranged to produce more knowledge workers than we can employ, creating a labor-excess economy that keeps labor costs down and productivity high. Maybe we keep doing this because in our heart of hearts, we really prefer it this way.”
Even critics of the gloomy forecasts, however, say that America’s science-and-engineering machine faces significant challenges in a world much altered by global competition and increasing diversity at home. The landscape has changed markedly from the days when a group of technically trained white men put another group of white men on the moon. As the number of those men entering science has declined, national leaders have sought to bring more women and minorities into the enterprise. At the same time, the United States has come to rely on an increasing proportion of foreign talent -- a strategy that could prove shortsighted if current restrictions on obtaining visas force international students and researchers to go elsewhere.
And even if the visa difficulties fade, leaders both inside and outside academe say the education system in the United States must reform itself to maintain the country’s technological edge.
The real crisis may not be one of quantity but of quality. “Academic institutions need to change to educate students in a much broader context than they do now,” says Warren M. Washington, chair of the National Science Board, which advises the president and Congress and oversees the National Science Foundation. “You’ll be hearing enlightened university presidents talking about this. But down at the department level, there’s this focusing only on the narrow sort of discipline objectives. That’s where it’s going to be hard to make changes.”
Imported Brainpower
Mr. Washington and his colleagues on the board offered a stark vision of the future in their May report, titled “An Emerging and Critical Problem of the Science and Engineering Labor Force.” The major sources of their concern reside within a six-pound document called “Science and Engineering Indicators, 2004,” a report issued every two years by the National Science Foundation. The board noted in particular a rising reliance on foreign-born talent, a decline in homegrown brainpower, increasing difficulty in attracting overseas scholars, and a looming shortage of scientists and engineers.
According to the “Indicators” report, the 2000 census showed a sharp rise in the numbers of foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States. They accounted for 17 percent of bachelor’s-degree holders, 29 percent of master’s-degree holders, and 38 percent of doctorate holders. A decade earlier, just 24 percent of doctorate holders were born outside the United States.
Although imported overseas talent has long helped America, the report raises concerns about the availability of such skilled people in the future. Policy changes since September 11, 2001, coupled with increasing competition for foreign students, make it less certain that the nation will attract international brainpower, according to the NSF. At the same time, the average age of the science-and-engineering work force in America is rising, auguring a wave of job openings.
Compounding the situation, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted in 2001 that the number of jobs in science and engineering would grow at a rate three times that of all occupations, on average, producing a 47-percent increase in science-and-engineering jobs by 2010. But the number of U.S.-born students getting doctorates in science and engineering has declined in recent years.
The science foundation also pointed to other signs that America’s technical edge is growing dull. For example, the number of science-and-engineering articles published by authors based in the United States remained flat throughout the 1990s, while authors in other nations significantly increased their output. (See article on Page A13.)
Recent events have only exacerbated other concerns over America’s scientific future. In March a survey of 113 U.S. graduate schools by the Council of Graduate Schools showed a 32-percent drop in the number of foreign applications coming into those schools, particularly from China. This sudden decrease sent a chill through university administrations and faculties across the country.
“We are seeing a very significant decline in our ability to get people here who want to come here,” says G. Wayne Clough, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We are seeing a decline, we believe, in the number of people who even want to come here, because high-tech economies are showing strength in India and China, as examples, and in other places. We’re also seeing a significant increase in the number of talented young people who came from China and Taiwan and India who say they’re going back.”
“We’ve got an odd set of currents,” says Mr. Clough, “that merged at this particular point, and it should concern us all.”
The Once and Future Shortage
Many experts have resisted the urge to jump on the bleakness bandwagon, however. They say they have seen it circle through their neighborhoods in years past, blaring what turned out to be a false alarm.
In 1986 Erich Bloch, director of the National Science Foundation, warned, “We are not training enough young scientists and engineers.” Four years later he wrote, “At the end of the pipeline, too few new Ph.D.'s are being produced, and an increasing fraction -- over 50 percent in engineering and mathematics -- are foreign students.” He also noted that “the demand for engineers, scientists, and technicians is growing about twice as fast as supply and will exceed supply by 35 percent in the year 2000.”
But it soon became clear that those predictions were about as accurate as long-term weather forecasts. As the 1990s progressed, the lack of science jobs forced increasing numbers of graduate students to continue their training after getting doctorates, sometimes moving from one fellowship to another before landing a more secure position. For example, in 1973 only 27 percent of the people earning biomedical Ph.D.'s went into postdoctoral positions. By 1995 the proportion had jumped to 63 percent.
In recent years scientists and engineers in certain sectors have found positions scarce, and jobless rates have sometimes exceeded those in the general population. For the first quarter of 2004, unemployment for computer scientists and systems analysts hit 6.7 percent, a record high. Last year the American Chemical Society concluded that “times are becoming very tough for the chemical profession,” with unemployment rates at an all-time high. With job announcements growing ever scarcer in journals, the proportion of new Ph.D. chemists entering postdoctoral positions jumped by 10 percent from 2002 to 2003.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics audited its own success in predicting job needs and found major errors in projections for technical fields. In 1990, for example, the bureau forecast that employment in electrical and electronics engineering would grow by 40 percent by the year 2000 -- but the number of jobs actually decreased by 16 percent. Agricultural and food science had 14 percent fewer positions by 2000, even though the bureau projected an increase of 21 percent.
Eleanor Babco, executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, a nonprofit organization concerned with work-force issues, pays close attention to such data. But she once learned a personal lesson about the perils of predicting employment needs. In 1982 she advised her son to go into petroleum engineering, a field in which the job market was particularly hot. “It was just at the height,” she says. “Well, when he came out, it was starting to go down so bad that Exxon hired just one person. We found out the hard way.”
Past errors make some leaders wary about new claims of a looming shortage, especially of foreign-born scientists. “I’m old enough now that I’ve heard the crisis before,” says Sally Mason, provost of Purdue University who is also a biologist. “I’m just going to wait and see what the data tell us.”
Purdue, which has the most foreign students of any American public university, has seen a decline in the number of applications to its graduate school this year. Part of the cause, Ms. Mason says, may be the university’s decision to impose an application fee, which could have discouraged less-qualified students from applying.
The university still receives far more international applicants than the number of available slots, and the application fee has had an added benefit. “We’re getting a much more serious group of students who are applying for our graduate programs than in the past,” Ms. Mason says. “Next fall I don’t think our class of international graduate students will be much smaller, if at all.”
Claudia I. Mitchell-Kernan, dean of the graduate division of the University of California at Los Angeles, says her institution is awaiting new enrollment figures. Last year fewer foreign students applied to the graduate school, but the number who enrolled increased. “As a matter of fact, our numbers have been going up for a decade,” she says.
For now, the school has far more foreign applicants than it can accept, so enrollments have not dropped. But if the trend continues for several more years, UCLA could see fewer foreign graduate students entering its science and engineering departments, she says.
The number of international graduate students enrolling in science and engineering at the University of Texas at Austin fell in 2003, although not because of a supply problem. More foreigners had applied to Texas in 2003 than the year before, but the university chose to admit fewer of them. And even though a quarter fewer foreign students applied to the university this year, it will still turn away nearly 4,000 aspiring science-and-engineering graduate students from overseas. Among the nation’s public universities, Texas has the second-largest number of foreign students.
Foreign Costs
One of the factors keeping international students out of the university is a state budget crunch, which has reduced the graduate school’s ability to offset the costs of educating students, says Victoria E. Rodríguez, dean of graduate studies. The budget problems affected American applicants, too. The university saw an increase in the number of domestic applications for graduate programs this year but admitted slightly fewer of them.
At some universities, foreign students in science and engineering end up costing more than domestic students do. Thus, in times of budget shortfalls, universities get more selective. The cost differential is a big factor in California, where the university or departments must pay a portion of the approximately $22,000 out-of-state tuition and fees charged to international students. Through the wondrous complexity of the California system’s budget, the tuition money does not go back to each campus in full, so universities end up losing money on foreign graduate students. (U.S. citizens not from California usually qualify as in-state students after their first year and pay only $7,500.)
“When it comes down to a foreign student costing two to three times what an American student costs, we’re very choosy,” says Marvin L. Cohen, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley and president-elect of the American Physical Society.
Recent visa restrictions and budget crunches in the United States have made Australia, Canada, and Europe far more enticing to top students around the world, he says: “Right now we’re losing students and postdoctoral students of very high abilities to other countries.”
Leaders in government, academe, and business also worry about a related problem: the growing competition from developing nations, like China and South Korea, that have built up their own research capabilities and are trying to lure their native sons and daughters back home after they train in the United States.
But the data contradict the rhetoric. The National Science Foundation reports that 76 percent of international students getting Ph.D.'s intend to stay in the United States now, up from 63 percent a decade ago.
Mr. Cohen argues that the United States should not look at those who do return to their own countries as a loss. “If they finish their Ph.D.'s and go back to their home country, then we have a friend for life,” he says. “It’s a win situation.” That’s true even in the case of China, he says: “We certainly are in some sort of a competition with China economically. But the people we train that go back, go back with many of our values.”
Those ideals extend beyond the obvious concepts of democracy into scientific principles, such as “the idea of open collaboration, and sharing, and giving other people a chance to look at your data because you haven’t figured it out.”
Still, the current international problems have hit close to home for Mr. Cohen. One of Mr. Cohen’s students went home to China last year to introduce his fiancée to his parents but couldn’t get back into the United States for several months because of a visa snafu. So when Mr. Cohen was preparing for a physics conference in Montreal in March, he made calculated decisions about who should attend. Unmarried students and postdocs could go, but married foreign students stayed home, so they would not be separated from their families if visa problems prevented their return.
Such troubles have taken their toll, but they may be temporary. Mr. Cohen discussed the issue with President Bush when the physicist received the National Medal of Science in 2001, and the administration recently pledged to resolve student-visa difficulties. What’s more, financial pressures in some states have begun to lighten.
“Part of the problem is that a lot of these numbers do change quickly” for international students, says B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. “If they changed quickly down, they can indeed change quickly up. So it’s always a little risky to be making prognoses about phenomena that are 15 to 20 years out. And we’ve been there before so many times.”
The Magnetic Pull of Physics
A report issued by the National Science Foundation last week supports Mr. Lowell’s concerns. Although the agency warned in May of the declining number of graduate degrees granted to American students, more recent data point to an opposite trend: Increasing numbers of U.S. citizens are now entering graduate school in engineering and every field of science. Enrollment climbed 6.7 percent from 2000 to 2002 for domestic students.
Several graduate schools contacted by The Chronicle echoed that conclusion by reporting increasing numbers of U.S. citizens applying for openings in science and engineering. At UCLA, for example, domestic enrollment in those areas has climbed from 1,771 in 1993 to 2,208 in 2003.
To a certain extent, universities have expected the numbers to go up slightly because of the sluggish U.S. economy. Graduate-school enrollments often spike when jobs disappear. But the trends have exceeded expectations in certain areas. The number of American citizens enrolling in physics graduate programs, for example, surged by 45 percent in the past five years.
Roman Czujko, director of the statistical-research center at the American Institute of Physics, says numbers tell only part of the story. Department chairs, he says, talk of a strong increase in the quality of U.S. citizens applying, “so they found themselves admitting quite a few U.S. students.” Although the NSF’s report shows a declining number of physics doctorates awarded to American citizens in recent years, those numbers should soon climb, says Mr. Czujko.
The magnetic pull of physics also has drawn increasing numbers of undergraduates. “Among the things we’re excited about is that the undergraduates have gone up 25 percent in five years,” he says.
The physics trend illustrates a fact not well advertised by the science foundation: While the number of doctorates awarded in science and engineering declined slightly from its peak, in 1998, the number of bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering has climbed over the past decade, both in total numbers and for U.S. citizens.
“At NSF, I think, they have a perverse focus on doctorates,” says Mr. Lowell. “Doctorates are not the only ones that run our R&D enterprise.”
In fact, over the past decade, a slowly growing percentage of bachelor’s-degree holders in science and engineering got jobs in those fields without first earning advanced degrees. In engineering, especially, higher-level degrees are not required. According to data collected by the NSF in 2001, 70 percent of engineers entered science-and-engineering jobs with bachelor’s degrees.
The growing number of undergraduates studying technical fields also contradicts prevailing notions about why more American students do not get doctorates.
“The place where the science establishment misreads what’s going on is that it implies it’s always an education problem: Somehow Americans are not getting good schooling” in elementary and secondary schools, says Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “That’s just nonsensical at one level. We have lots and lots of very bright people who could go into science and engineering who don’t.”
Mr. Freeman, like other economists, looks to dollars to make sense of the trends among graduate students. “They’re not studying science,” he says, “because they look and say, ‘Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, with extreme uncertainty working in somebody else’s lab, and maybe getting credit for my work and maybe not getting full credit? Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.'s?’”
So Many Grad Students
Economists and others who track the job market raise a heretical question: Is the United States educating too many scientists and engineers? The surprising answer coming from some quarters is an emphatic yes.
An article published this spring in Today’s Engineer stated, “Many practicing engineers disagree with the recommendation to increase the number of U.S. citizens pursuing science and engineering studies and careers.”
With wages stagnant and too few jobs for engineers, adding to the work force will only make those careers less attractive, says one of the authors, George F. McClure, a retired aerospace engineer who studies employment issues for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “The problem is that everybody has focused on the supply side, and very few have focused on the demand side,” he says. “People in colleges and universities are concerned with maintaining the pipeline and throughput.”
In a case study, Ms. Stephan, the Georgia State economist, has analyzed the growth of the bioinformatics field, generally regarded as one of the hottest areas in science. The number of degree programs blossomed from 21 in 1999 to 74 in 2003.
“There’s been a tremendous increase in the number of students in these programs,” she says. But, she adds, “we also track job announcements in bioinformatics, and they’ve been declining.”
She sees parallels to other leading fields. “Everybody is talking right now that there’ll be lots and lots of jobs in nanotechnology,” she says. “I’ve not seen a convincing case that that is happening, or that it will happen.”
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, Ms. Stephan says. “Academe has a big vested interest here.”
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.
Harvard’s Mr. Freeman argues that academe and the government need to revamp the system. Students and postdocs, especially from foreign countries, make up a corps of “cheap labor,” he says. “It runs the system, and it runs it very efficiently, in terms of the taxpayer.” He advocates increasing wages for graduate students and postdocs in order to make careers in science and engineering more attractive to domestic students.
Universities as Culprits
Mr. Washington, chair of the National Science Board, agrees that universities could be doing a disservice to graduate students. “There’s some kind of personal responsibility that professors and departments should have,” he says. “They do have a responsibility to ask the question: Are they generating too many students? Or are they are generating students who haven’t got the skills to apply for the jobs that are out there?”
He and others are urging universities to change the way they educate doctoral students. Jobs in academe are scarce, says Mr. Washington, and as graduate students in science grow ever more specialized, the trend does not prepare them well for the job market.
“If someone has a good combination of skills and did a Ph.D. or master’s,” he says, “they can probably have a much easier time finding a job in industry or government, whereas someone who is a real narrow specialist can’t get a job unless they get a job in an academic department. Even then they’re not the ideal teacher, because they’ll just be creating clones of themselves.”
Leaders in engineering have reached a similar conclusion. A committee of the National Academy of Engineering recently concluded that an engineer in 2020 will have to range far wider than in the past and will be solving problems in fields as diverse as biotechnology and business. Sharon L. Nunes, vice president for emerging business and research at IBM, who served on the committee, notes that her company has shifted strongly in recent years into the service industry. She sees parallels for engineers in general.
“This is really going to open the doors and encourage a lot more young people to consider this as a career,” she says, “especially if you think about women and underrepresented minorities, who may now think about engineering as problem solving, not just as the pure technical profession that portrays the geeky engineer that most people think of.”
The appeal to women and minorities has been a constant refrain of the science bureaucracy for the past 20 years. And while increasing numbers of female, black, and Hispanic students have been heading toward science-and-engineering graduate schools, the nation still has far to go, says Ms. Mitchell-Kernan, of UCLA’s graduate division. “There are still substantial gaps between the white, Latino, and African-American populations.”
The demographics of higher education are shifting in California, as they are all across America, and will soon be dominated by minorities that have traditionally steered away from math and science. That is the challenge that higher education, from universities to two-year colleges, must meet. And although no one can predict how many scientists and engineers the nation will need in 20 years, everyone agrees that the faces of those technical leaders will be far more diverse than those of generations past, and that American universities will scour the world for the best minds.
THE SCIENTIFIC WORK FORCE: IS THE BEAKER HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY? Some experts worry that the United States will face a shortage of scientists and engineers because American institutions are producing fewer doctorates in those fields. In the past, foreign citizens have helped fill the gap, but visa restrictions since September 11, 2001, have stemmed the flow of foreign students and postdoctoral researchers into the United States.
Earned doctorates in science and engineering fields
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| Visas issued
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Projected shortages, however, do not take recent trends into account. For example, enrollment in science and engineering graduate programs is rising. And job growth in many fields has not been as strong as anticipated. Record numbers of chemists are currently out of work.
Graduate enrollment
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| Unemployment rate for chemists*
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| | | * As of March 1 each year |
SOURCES: National Science Foundation; American Chemical Society
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 44, Page A10