Random Facts and Statistics in the Markets for Advanced Training

 

"Are there enough qualified students to increase the production of scientists and engineers without compromising quality? Statistics collected by the Department of education suggest that there are. These data are based on surveys that track students in the high school classes of 1972, 1980, and 1982 beginning with their freshmen year in college. The results indicate that a large fraction of interested and qualified students are 'lost' to science and engineering between their freshman and senior years in college.

• Only 46% percent of those freshmen who declared their intention to major in science or engineering eventually received baccalaureate degrees in those fields.

 
• Of the freshmen who switched out of science and engineering, only 31% did so because they found the course work too difficult; 43% found other fields more interesting; and 26% believed they would have better job prospects elsewhere"

 

-Richard Atkinson, April 27 1990, Science Magazine

"...it is taking progressively longer to earn a Ph.D.: the median time required to complete the degree increased from 5.3 years in 1968 to 6.9 years in 1988. Attrition has also increased.... There is ample evidence that lax practices and unenforced policies within universities contribute to such high attrition and prolonged time to degrees."

-Rosenzweig and Vaughn,  Heading off a PhD Shortage,  pg. 71

"...the big growth over the last 15 years in postdoctoral education in America has been among international students. In science and engineering, the number of domestic postdoctoral students has stayed relatively constant, going from roughly 13,500 in 1977 to 15,500 in 1991. Over that same period the number of international postdoctoral students in American universities has nearly tripled, from about 6,000 to 16,000. Foreign nationals now comprise the majority of all science and engineering postdocs in the United States. Again, these numbers are probably soft, but my guess is that the fraction of postdocs in America who are international students may be even higher than these numbers indicate. ..."

-"Postdoctoral Education in America" by Steven B. Sample, President, University of Southern California, September 23, 1993

"...the number of native-born  Americans in S&E Ph.D. programs has not declined. As increasing  numbers of foreign students have arrived, native enrollments have  held constant over the last 30 years at around 13,000 annually."

-Bhagwati and Rao, The False Alarm of 'Too Many  Scientists'

"Between 1980 and 1988, average compensation for academic research personnel (faculty and non-faculty) has increased by nearly 25 percent, accounting for inflation. Source: National Science Foundation, Division of Policy Research and Analysis."

-Report of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable on 'Science and Technology in the Academic Enterprise: Status, Trends, and Issues' Chaired by Erich Bloch as Director of the National Science Foundation, 1989,  Pg. 1-29

"In 1992, [the number of immigrant scientists and engineers] jumped to nearly 23,000 compared with 11,000 - 12,000 a year during the 1980s (NSB, 1993:82).  More than half were from East Asia, and two-thirds to three fourths have been engineers. The increase probably resulted from the Immigration Act of 1990, which was passed in response to predictions by NSF and others in the late 1980s that a shortage of scientists and engineers was impending."

-Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers,  Pg. 70

"We would clearly have experienced serious faculty shortages throughout the 1980's were it not for the supply of non-U.S. citizen PhD's produced in the US. Only 478 of the 1990-91 new doctorates were U.S. citizens, a number far too low to fill the available positions, even in the current tight market"

-Employment and the U.S. Mathematics Doctorate, American Mathematical Society, Report of the AMS Task Force on Employment, July 1992

"A Gannett News Service computer analysis of more than one million government files found that universities are among the top recruiters for both permanent and temporary workers. Three of the top five sponsors of permanent job based immigrants over the past 8 years were University of California, University of Texas and the State University of New York."

-Jim Specht