For as long as most people can remember, at least as far back as the Sputnik launch in 1957, Americans have feared that their nation’s colleges weren’t giving companies enough good scientists and engineers.
But in fact, the number of talented college graduates in the sciences is “quite in excess of the demand,” said Harold Salzman, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University. In a new paper, he and a colleague argue that the real problem is at the employment end of the pipeline.
Fewer than half of all college graduates in science and engineering actually take jobs in those fields, with the percentage who do actually dropping in more-recent years among the top-scoring students. The United States could largely resolve any industry shortfalls by simply persuading more of those elite graduates to stay in their field, they say.
The analysis, drawn from 30 years of data compiled by the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor on student enrollment, performance, and career choices, is described in a paper titled “Steady as She Goes? Three Generations of Students Through the Science and Engineering Pipeline.” Mr. Salzman wrote the paper along with B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies for the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University.
Their statistics support the stories of recent graduates like Abby M. Anderegg, who earned a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Iowa in 2001 and now works for Accenture, a management-consulting firm in Chicago, where she helps sell insurance software.
Ms. Anderegg says she always enjoyed science and technical problem solving as a student, but made the career move because jobs in chemical engineering seemed too “factory focused.” At Accenture, she says, she can travel and enjoy more excitement and variety than she saw during a semester she spent working in an engineering capacity for the agriculture company Monsanto.
A generation earlier, in 1967, Phillip O. Mayberry graduated from Iowa with a degree in industrial engineering, yet has spent his entire career in sales and marketing. He is now a vice president at Emerson Process Management, where he sells computerized control systems for power plants and refineries.
“I wanted to deal with people and be more involved in working with clients than anything else,” said Mr. Mayberry.
Oft-Heard Warnings
Mr. Salzman and Mr. Lowell said they began their study, in part, to explore the often-heard concern that the United States’ global leadership is at risk as the nation’s schools and colleges fail to keep pace with foreign competitors, especially in the sciences.
A seminal moment was the 2005 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” from the National Academies, which said Congress should set numerical targets for the production of more college graduates in sciences and education in order to keep pace with China and other nations.
And only last month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said American schools weren’t producing enough talented mathematics and science students. “We know our students must get dramatically better if we’re going to compete in the international economy,” Mr. Duncan told the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Mr. Salzman and Mr. Lowell said their review of federal educational and labor statistics, dating back to the 1970s, suggests that’s not the whole story. Among 1977 college graduates in science and engineering, only 35 percent were working in what the government considered to be a related field 10 years later, the data showed. That percentage climbed up to 44 percent among 1993 graduates measured by their 2003 occupations. Among those graduates in the top fifth of their class by grade-point average, the percentages held steadier: Forty-five percent of the 1977 graduates were working in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM fields) 10 years later, as were 43 percent of the 1993 graduates, the report said.
The research was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose program director for the project, Michael S. Teitelbaum, has long argued that American technology companies aren’t doing enough to make their jobs attractive to college graduates. He called the project “the first systematic effort to understand trends among U.S. students pursuing math and science as careers.”
Companies and Deans Disagree
It may not be so easy to convince companies, however, that they’re the main problem. Susan L. Traiman, director of public policy at Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of the largest American companies, said the analysis by Mr. Salzman and Mr. Lowell had some potential shortcomings that may explain why its findings contradicted the experience of many engineering companies. Companies are having an especially difficult time finding U.S.-born science and engineering graduates at the doctorate level, said Arthur J. Rothkopf, head of the Education and Workforce program at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Microsoft and Intel and Texas Instruments are looking for and can’t find enough of them,” Mr. Rothkopf said.
Potential flaws in the Salzman-Lowell report include the use of a broad federal definition of what constitutes a STEM occupation, Ms. Traiman said. In particular, she said, the data include the outcomes for graduates in the life sciences, which may mask significant shortages of engineering graduates. The study data also include foreign-born students, whose availability to American companies may be subject to shifts in the political climate, she said.
“We still are not getting a strong enough pipeline of U.S. students entering these fields,” Ms. Traiman said.
The fundamental suggestion by Mr. Salzman and Mr. Lowell—that science and engineering companies perhaps should be doing more to grab science and engineering students—may even have trouble winning support on university campuses, where engineering deans increasingly take pride in graduating students with a diverse set of talents, who are able to take on a range of professional challenges, rather than simply follow traditional engineering paths.
Joseph J. Helble, dean of engineering at Dartmouth College, said he is actively recruiting students from other majors at his liberal-arts institution, with the goal of putting science-trained graduates into all manner of job situations. He is “stunned,” he said, by any suggestion that the nation is graduating enough engineers.
Rather than try to limit career choices for engineering graduates, Mr. Helble said, “we just need to increase the denominator and let them go where they choose to go, because I think it’s useful for society broadly to have more people trained quantitatively and analytically as engineers populating many different professions.”
Both Mr. Helble and Mr. Salzman said the debate in the United States was emotionally skewed by unwarranted worries about China and India. Both countries are graduating large numbers of scientists and engineers, they said, but of a quality that U.S. companies widely regard as inferior. And those countries also need much larger numbers of engineers at home, just because of the sheer size of the job of building modern infrastructure such as roads and power plants that already exist in the United States, they said.
And Ms. Traiman, despite questioning some of the specifics in the report, said she understood the need for American companies—including those in engineering—to compete harder on both salary and lifestyle issues to attract graduates like Ms. Anderegg.
“It’s not surprising that smart students follow the money,” Ms. Traiman said. “This isn’t just for companies hiring scientists and engineers. There is a very competitive marketplace for talent.”