Education: Jobs and Global Trade, Part 1

Science and engineering workforce changes taking place

Many industrial countries have slow-growing or stagnating populations with rising average ages, and their young citizens are not inclined to enter science and engineering careers. Outflows of highly educated personnel to other countries, especially to the United States, are a growing focus of policy attention. Advanced developing nations are expanding their higher education systems and the high-technology sectors of their economies in an effort to develop internationally competitive centers of excellence.

• In the past, these countries have been a main source of internationally mobile scientific and technical talent, but recently some of them have developed programs designed to retain their highly trained personnel and to even attract people from abroad.
• Because their more developed counterparts also face this issue, these trends have set up the potential for growing competition in the recruitment of foreign talent and for continuing international mobility of firms to low-cost countries with well-trained workforces.
• In the United States, the issue of expanding the domestic science and engineering degree production is receiving increased attention.

Status of U.S. science and engineering workforce

• At the end of the past decade, about one-third of the 10.5 million people with bachelor's or higher degrees in science and engineering were actually employed in science and engineering occupations, holding job titles such as engineer; mathematician; and physical, life, computer, or social scientist.
• Others worked in jobs not classified as science and engineering; such as, managerial, marketing and sales, planning, and quality control positions.
• In both types of jobs, their role was critical to the functioning of a knowledge-based economy.
• They produced new knowledge; transformed it into innovative products, processes, and services; moved these innovations into the marketplace; and developed entirely new markets.
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects differential growth that favors science and engineering occupations over the decade ranging from 2000 to 2010.
• Much of the projected difference is attributable to expected strong growth in mathematics/computer-related occupations.
• Even without the addition of these jobs, the growth rate of science and engineering jobs remains higher than the rate for the labor force as a whole, but not by an order of magnitude.
• Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics projection has not been updated to reflect current difficulties in the information technology (IT) sector, those growth estimates are likely to change.
• An indication of the difficulties that the IT sector, and science and engineering employment in general, faces can be gleaned from employment and unemployment trends reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that employment in science and engineering occupations rose strongly throughout the 1990s until 2001 (when it reached a record 5.6 million), and then declined to 5.4 million in 2002.
• Unemployment rates for science and engineering occupations, which traditionally have been lower than the national average for the civilian labor force as a whole, rose strongly in 2002.
• Breaking precedent, the unemployment rate for computer programmers exceeded the national average in 2002, and the rate for science and engineering technicians approached the average.

Retirements and demographic shifts

• Unless current retirement rates change dramatically, the science and engineering workforce in the United States will experience rapid growth in total retirements over the next two decades.
• More than half of those with science and engineering degrees are age 40 or older, and the 40–44 age group is nearly four times as large as the 60–64 age group.
• Without changes in the production of degrees, retirement behavior, or immigration, these figures imply that the U.S. science and engineering workforce will continue to grow; but at a slower rate than before, and that its average age will increase over the next two decades.
• These trends have placed attention on the needed replenishment of the U.S. science and engineering workforce, with a focus on domestic degree production.
• Even as larger proportions of U.S. citizens avail themselves of higher education, the nation has lost the advantage it held for several decades as the country offering by far the most widespread access to higher education.
• Starting in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1990s, other countries built up their postsecondary education systems, and a number of them now provide a first-level college degree to at least one-third of their college-age students.
• There is evidence that many countries are trying to increase production of degrees in science and engineering.
• They appear to be succeeding in that goal well beyond what the United States has been able to achieve over the past 25 years.