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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Dan Greenberg

Scientists and Engineers in Short Supply? Not Likely

The talent shortage that never materializes was proclaimed again this week on Capitol Hill, this time by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who warned that American companies “face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.”

To bring on those breakthroughs, Gates, and many others, call for allowing the entry of more foreign talent, as well as improving American science and math education to produce more home-grown talent.

The scientist and engineer shortage or shortfall—we’ll get to the difference in a moment — is a familiar specter at Congressional hearings. The reason is, in defiance of facts, it suits the needs of higher education, industry, and the federal research bureaucracy, even if it doesn’t exist. For academe, a dearth of scientists and education clearly means Washington must provide more money for academic science and engineering. For industry, it means immigration barriers must be lowered to bring in more foreign scientists and engineers, who generally work for lower pay, despite presumed safeguards against cheap labor undercutting domestic wages. For the government research agencies, it means bigger budgets are essential.

Strangely, the alleged shortages have not sent wages soaring in science and engineering, nor have they have created a job-seeker’s nirvana in these fields.
Any university advertising a tenure track opening will find its e-mail swamped with resumes from well-qualified applicants. The market for engineers varies with time, place, and specialty, but many engineers report difficulty in finding work suitable for their talent and experience.

America has never produced enough scientists and engineers for its needs, and foreigners have long flocked here to fill the gaps, and continue to do so. Foreign scientists and engineers built the atomic bomb, directed the moon landings, and heavily populate Silicon Valley. Warnings that someday they will all return to their native lands are empty alarms. Some return, most stay, while many others strive to come here. “Stay rates,” as they’re known, remain very high.

The dearth of Americans going into science and engineering may be attributable in part to the relative unpopularity and poor quality of science and math studies at the secondary levels. But many students well qualified for studies leading to careers in these fields choose to proceed elsewhere — for sound economic reasons. Five to seven years of postgraduate work are generally required for a science Ph.D. Jobs in the life sciences are especially scarce, with the pharmaceutical industry cutting back on research; and so are grants from NIH, where the average age of first-time grantees is over 40. Job opportunities and careers in engineering are especially vulnerable to the ups and downs of defense and aerospace spending and the vagaries of the computer and software industries.

Back in the mid-80s, the National Science Foundation tried to panic Congress into a big budget boost with shrill warnings of an oncoming massive “shortfall” of scientists and engineers. Because of the “baby bust” in the 1960s, NSF forecast, student numbers would decline and the “pipeline” for science and engineering studies would suffer a loss of 675,000 bachelor degrees between 1986 and 2010.
As headlines proclaimed an oncoming shortage, NSF quietly explained that “shortfall” and “shortage” were different, with shortfall merely meaning a decline from past demographic levels, while shortage meant needed workers did not exist.

As NSF and its academic friends fed the panic, a few skeptics cast doubt on the worrisome forecasts of shortage, shortfall, scarcity, and crisis. There is no foreseeable shortage of scientists and engineers, Robert M. White, president of the National Academy of Engineering, declared. A Congressional hearing brought reports of suppression of “shortfall” skeptics within NSF.

Under fire from Congress and independent workforce specialists, NSF retreated from the crisis warnings, concluding, in 1999, that “predictions of an oversupply in the 1970s did not come true, and predictions of shortages in the late 1980s also failed to occur. What is clear is that S&E positions are in a state of flux.”

The abundantly endowed Gates Foundation might attempt a useful experiment in talent supply. Advertise doubled pay for software engineers. A negligible response is not likely.

Posted at 09:06:54 AM on March 15, 2008 | All postings by dgreenberg

Comments

  1. The following is a brief history of shortage forecasts excerpted from Michael Teitelbaum at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It is consistent with my experience:

    http://www.sloan.org/programs/documents/PublicInterestTeitelbaum2003.pdf

    It was written in 2002 and some of it is old.

    A history of gloomy forecasts

    Pronouncements of shortages in American science and engineering have a long history. They date at least to the late 1950s, around the time the USSR launched Sputnik, the first orbiting satellite, prompting concerns that an era of Soviet technological advantage over the United States had emerged. The United States responded with massive public investments in science and engineering education. This led to sharp increases in the numbers pursuing such studies, and a surfeit in the 1970s of entry-level scientists and engineers.

    The recent history of shortage forecasts begins in the mid 1980s, when the then-leadership of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a few top research universities began to predict “looming shortfalls” of scientists and engineers in the next two decades. Their arguments were based upon quite simplistic demographic projections produced by a small policy office reporting to the NSF director—projections that earlier had been sharply criticized by the NSF’s own science and engineering workforce experts.

    Only a few years later, it became apparent that the trends actually pointed toward a growing surplus of scientists and engineers. In 1992, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight conducted a formal investigation and hearing about the shortfall projections, leading to much embarrassment at the NSF. In his opening remarks at the hearing, the subcommittee’s Chairman, Democrat Howard Wolpe of Michigan, declared that the “credibility of the [National Science] Foundation is seriously damaged when it is so careless about its own product.” Sherwood Boehlert, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican and now chair of the full House Science Committee, called the NSF director’s shortfall predictions “the equivalent to shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.” They were “based on very tenuous data and analysis. In short, a mistake was made,” he said. “Let’s figure out how to avoid similar mistakes, and then move on.”

    Boehlert’s advice was not heeded. Only five years later, during the high-tech boom of the late 1990s, an industry association known as the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) began to produce a series of reports asserting burgeoning gaps and shortages of information-technology workers, based on proprietary surveys of what it termed “job openings.” The first ITAA report claimed that some 190,000 information-technology jobs could not be filled in 1997. The second concluded that there were 346,000 open positions in 1998. The Department of Commerce then produced its own report, which drew heavily upon the findings of the two ITAA reports.

    The General Accounting Office (GAO) published a sharply critical assessment of these three related reports in 1998. It concluded that all of their shortfall estimates were questionable due to the studies’ weak methodologies and very low response rates. Unabashed, ITAA returned to the fray in 2000. Its third report asserted that over 843,000 information-technology positions would go unfilled that year due to a shortfall of qualified workers. Despite withering criticism from the GAO, the ITAA reports provided useful political support for the successful lobbying campaign for dramatic expansion—to the current level of 195,000 per year—of the H-1B visa, the temporary-visa program for foreign “specialty workers” that comprise the bulk of foreign science and engineering professionals being admitted to work in the United States.

    Remarkably, even the recent economic downturn does not seem to have deterred proponents of the workforce shortage theory. Take NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, who invoked a shortage argument during testimony before the House Science Committee in October 2002 on NASA’s hiring problems. “Throughout the Federal government, as well as the private sector, the challenge faced by a lack of scientists and engineers is real and is growing by the day,” O’Keefe told the committee.

    The following month a new organization called Building Engineering and Science Talent (BEST) published a report entitled “The Quiet Crisis: Falling Short in Producing American Scientific and Technical Talent.” This “quiet crisis,” the report’s authors noted, “stems from the gap between the nation’s growing need for scientists, engineers, and other technically skilled workers and its production of them…. This ‘gap’ represents a shortfall in our national scientific and technical capabilities.”

    Some business leaders and academics are also advancing the shortage thesis despite the economic downturn. Two reports with findings similar to the BEST study subsequently emerged in the spring of 2003. One was a report addressed to the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) of the National Academies, and the other was prepared by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), an organization of business and education leaders.

    Even some associated with the NSF seem unchastened by the embarrassing failure of the “shortfall” projections of a decade ago. In June 2003, the National Science Board, the NSF’s governing body, released for public comment a draft task-force report addressing the “unfolding crisis” in science and engineering. “Current trends of supply and demand for [science and engineering] skills in the workplace indicate problems that may seriously threaten our long-term prosperity, national security, and quality of life,” it said.

    The evidence

    The profound irony of many such claims is the disjuncture between practice in the scientific and engineering professions—in which accurate empirical evidence and careful analyses are essential—and that among promoters of “shortage” claims in the public sphere, where the analytical rigor is often, to be kind, quite weak. Few, if any, of the market indicators signaling shortages exist. Strong upward pressure on real wages and low unemployment rates relative to other education-intensive professions are two such indicators conspicuously absent from the contemporary marketplace.

    A RAND study released earlier this year assembled the available data from its own research, the NSF, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the National Research Council (NRC), and several scientific associations. What RAND found largely discredits the case being made for labor shortages. First, RAND noted the obsolescence of the available data, the newest of which refers mostly to 1999 or 2000. RAND called this “especially unfortunate” given that “the [science and engineering] workforce situation has arguably changed significantly” since those heady times of the dot-com, information technology, and telecom booms. But more importantly, RAND’s analysis of even data from the boom period showed that “neither earnings patterns nor unemployment patterns indicate [a science and engineering] shortage in the data we were able to find.”

    Recent government unemployment data tend to confirm these findings. Data for the first and second quarters of 2003 released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed surprisingly high unemployment rates in science and engineering fields. Even the recently “hot” computer and mathematical occupations are experiencing unemployment of 5.4 to 6 percent. For computer programmers, the numbers range from 6.7 to 7.5 percent. All engineering (and architecture) occupations taken together are averaging 4.4 percent unemployment, while the rates for the high-tech fields of electrical and electronic engineering are in the range of 6.4 to 7 percent. Reported unemployment in the life, physical, and social sciences ranges from 2.8 to 4.1 percent. Many of these numbers are remarkably high for such high-skill occupations. Unemployment for the whole of the U.S. workforce averaged about 6 percent over the same period, and highly educated groups such as scientists and engineers normally have substantially lower unemployment rates than the national average.

    In the natural-science disciplines, which employ far fewer people than engineering, numerous reports by leading scientists have been pointing to increasingly unattractive career prospects for newly minted Ph.D.s. As one example among many, a 1998 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee on careers in the life sciences—the largest field in the natural sciences—reported that “recent trends in employment opportunities suggest that the attractiveness to young people of careers in life-science research is declining.” More recent data from 2002 showed that key indicators of career problems had continued to deteriorate since then, prompting Shirley Tilghman, the NAS committee’s chair and current president of Princeton University, to tell Science magazine that she found the 2002 data “appalling.” She said the data reviewed earlier by the committee looked “bad” at the time, “but compared to today, they actually look pretty good.” The 2003 RAND study concurred. “Altogether, the data … do not portray the kind of vigorous employment and earnings prospects that would be expected to draw increasing numbers of bright and informed young people into [science and engineering] fields,” RAND concluded.

    It is of course quite possible to have “appalling” early career problems in some areas of science and engineering alongside very good career prospects in others. Administrators of federal technical agencies such as NASA do face special problems such as hiring freezes or other ongoing personnel or financial constraints. Senior personnel at NASA and other agencies have been offered substantial early retirement incentives while hiring procedures to replace them tend to be cumbersome and slow. In “hot” fields that are new or growing rapidly, like bioinformatics, human resources are inevitably in short supply. And truly exceptional scientists and engineers will always be few in number and vigorously pursued by employers.

    Still, in most areas of science and engineering at present, the available data show sufficient numbers or even surpluses of highly qualified candidates with extensive postgraduate education. This is especially the case in the academy, which has become risk-averse about replacing departing tenured faculty with tenure-track junior positions. Instead, many universities in the United States have been filling such open slots with temporary and part-time appointees they find in ample pools of highly educated applicants. Indeed, advertisements for a single tenure-track assistant professorship often attract hundreds of applications from recent Ph.D.s. Similar circumstances prevail for engineers and scientists in large sectors of the U.S. economy such as telecommunications, computing, and software, sectors in which lurching market collapses and large bankruptcies have greatly weakened demand for their services.

    — jhm · Mar 15, 02:49 PM · #

  2. Why do american students not go into science and engineering???

    Its simple. Scientists graduate with high debt, and attain relatively low pay. My brother makes more as a PE teacher than I do as a PHD in science. My other brother makes more in the Navy after fewer years than do I, and with better benefits.

    So, what is the incentive? If the money isn’t there, the students won’t be.

    — mlm · Mar 16, 03:28 PM · #

  3. I disagree: the money is there, at least in engineering. What we see is that American-born and American-educated bachelor-degree-level engineers command great salaries, in entry level positions right out of college. It is the foreign-born, foreign-educated students who must get American graduate engineering degrees to be considered for American jobs.

    When you factor engineering separately from math and science, you see huge shortages in the number of students pursuing engineering as a career. The problem isn’t a lack of engineering schools, it is a lack of students to enroll in them. We must start with elementary and middle school students, informing them of the rewards of an engineering career and then giving them the math and science education they need through high school so that they can qualify for admission into engineering colleges.

    The shortage of engineers is real and acute and must be addressed.

    — JPS · Mar 17, 08:20 AM · #

  4. The Vietnam thing did a real dump on the entire engineering community—I remember Lincoln Labs families giving us lonely undergrads thanksgiving dinners with them while the wives divorced the husbands over their compliance in war industry stuff, over dinner. A whole generation of would be and real engineers felt the full brunt of not being in control of the social contexts in which they, their lives, and their careers got “used” by society, not always in constructive or nice ways. Being a “tool” of others, not nicely minded, is fear-inducing and deterred many.

    Also prices are informative in many cases and the price of an engineer and of a scientist today reflect demand imbalance with supply. The prices are not great, except for the obvious speciality areas of high investment interest—(exaggerated worth) systems bio, systems and security programming, net 2.0 and 3.0 stuff, and the like. Note this is Gates’ territory so he quite rightly complains that these info speciality engineers are lacking in the US supply chain.

    To be honest, I was so personally fascinated with the universe and how it worked and how little I understood of how it worked that I was 40 years old before the idea of needing money from investigating all that occurred to me (family and kids probably played a role). To have millions and a dozen vacation homes and not understand how utterly un-understandable gravity still is, is true tragic living in my book. I shiver whenever I read some genius other’s attempt to make sense of gravity. That so elemental a part of experience remains so utterly recalcitrant to “explanation” is the best kind of mental sex there is. A naked member of the opposite sex, versus, a naked universe of phenomena.

    You can underpay people like me if you free me to revel in and love the knowledge boundaries that fascinate me and make all of my life fascinating to me. I am like a little boy fascinated that we could come from grasslands of Africa and down from living in trees and in a few generations harnass the energy of stars for our purposes and detect the origin and fate of the universe (to a point). I shiver as I write this. It is too wonderful for words (and pay). It makes life worth living. Our whole society of MBA lusting shell-persons may denigrate science and mark its inconsequentiality with its low pay, but they do not know what they are missing.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 17, 08:36 AM · #

  5. I fail to see the wisdom of discouraging anyone from becoming a scientist or engineer.

    — greenblue · Mar 18, 10:12 AM · #

  6. I speak of engineers. Much the same applies to scientists. The engineering supply problem is real, but more complex than usually presented. Engineers serve many more need than simply engineering new products. China, for example, has many engineers in policy-making leadership positions. Those engineers bring insight into policy making that more traditional political leaders lack. Our national engineering effort is heavily influenced by leaders who are, charitably, not brilliantly aware of how engineering promotes a better future.

    More than many career fields, engineering is prone to knowledge obsolescence. Diesel power plant engineering knowledge of today will be partly obsolete tomorrow, for example.

    Engineers come in full array of talent, ambition, work ethic, etc. It does little good to prove that overall supply equals or exceeds total job openings. What is needed is an abundant supply of cutting edge talent in each of the myriad fields and sub-fields of engineering. Some graduating engineers will move into management or other fields, some will prove dysfunctional in all the ways known to humans; a few will be—whisper softly—a bit lazy, while still more will not be adept at collaborative working. Only a few will make major innovations that will impact millions. We need every such innovator that can be gained through an expanded output of engineering graduates.

    Labor cost is a crucial issue. Complaints of low salaries are genuine, on the part of engineers. But from a national view, we must compete on labor costs with other nations, and America is increasingly unable to compete effectively on a level playing field. Unless we produce sufficient engineers to keep engineering labor costs low in America, employers will have incentive to move operations overseas, or to buy directly from oversea producers who enjoy the competitive advantage of lower engineering labor cost.

    Our relative shortage of engineers may contribute to the near-total absence of engineers in K-12 education. We excel in preventing any meaningful contact between school students and engineers. During my entire K-12 time, I never once had an engineering class even as an option. I never saw an engineer, never had an engineer as a teacher, and knew almost nothing about engineering careers. That level of ignorance remains entrenched in American life today. It is a prescription for mediocrity. We can do better and for the good of our future, we should do better.

    — Marvin McConoughey · Mar 18, 10:36 AM · #

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