A Business Week article from a few years back challenges the idea that the U.S. is producing fewer engineers than China and India.
Is America losing its competitive edge in engineering? Top Silicon Valley executives, U.S. think-tanks, industry associations, and university deans have all pointed out dropping enrollment in American science and tech programs and warn of a brewing problem. And in a November survey of 4,000 U.S. engineers, 64% said outsourcing makes them worry about the profession's future, while less than 10% feel sure America will maintain its leadership in technology.
Such gloom is reinforced by a raft of oft-cited statistics: the U.S. graduates only 70,000 engineers a year, and enrollment in engineering schools is declining fast. India, meanwhile, turns out 350,000 engineers annually, while Chinese universities produce 600,000, by some estimates. Indeed, with Asian techies earning anywhere from a quarter to a tenth of what their Western counterparts do, doomsayers might ask why any intelligent young American would pursue engineering.
But how accurate are such numbers? And how does the theory of American decline square with the reality that graduates of good U.S. engineering schools seem to have little problem finding jobs? Vivek Wadhwa, a founder of several tech startups and an occasional contributor to BusinessWeek Online who's now an executive in residence at Duke University says he got so disturbed by the anxieties of bright engineering students that he helped supervise a study released in December to get to the bottom of such questions.
The conclusion: Because of fuzzy definitions of "engineering graduate," estimates of Indian and Chinese numbers can be wildly exaggerated, while America's are understated.
Just look at the numbers using consistent criteria. If one counts people who study computer science and information technology as engineers -- as India does -- then the U.S. grants 134,000 four-year engineering degrees annually. Indeed, the U.S. is producing far more engineers per capita than either of Asia's emerging superpowers. Indian schools grants only 122,000 four-year engineering degrees (and almost as many three-year degrees), while China generates 351,000.
The bottom line is that America's engineering crisis is a myth, Wadhwa argues. Both sides in the globalization debate are "spreading propaganda," he contends. India and China are using inflated engineering numbers because they want to draw more foreign investment, while fearmongers in the U.S. use dubious data either to support their case for protectionism, to lobby for greater government spending on higher education and research, or to justify their offshore investments.
So there you go.
