An article in this week's Science News of the Week by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee (AAAS membership or Science site license required for access) discusses the report from the Urban Institute and the Congressional hearings on the scientific workforce we blogged about last week. "A new study questions two basic tenets" of the argument that American needs to produce more scientists and engineers or risk losing its economic edge, "concluding that work force data do not support claims of a looming labor shortage and that test scores indicate U.S. students are doing at least as well in science and math as their international counterparts are."
The authors of the Urban Institute study "note that the annual U.S. production of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in STEM fields has averaged three times the annual growth of science and engineering jobs between 1985 and 2000. They also point out that fewer than one-third of the 15.7 million workers with at least one STEM degree at any level hold jobs that require such training."
So
why do people continue to argue that America needs to produce more
scientists and engineers? The article makes it clear what
workforce-expansion proponents believe is at stake in the debate. "The
supposedly sorry state of STEM (science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics) education was a driving force behind enactment this
summer of the America COMPETES Act, which authorizes $44 billion for a
cornucopia of research and education programs across several federal
agencies (Science, 10 August, p. 736),"
writes Bhattacharjee. And Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed
Martin and chair of the National Academies of Science (NAS) panel that
produced the Gathering Storm
report, acknowledges that "Salzman and Lowell have raised some
important issues but
that he is worried their criticism could undermine efforts to boost the
research and training budgets of federal research agencies slated for
growth in the COMPETES Act." If you want bigger science budgets, he
seems to be saying, you have to argue that America needs more
scientists, whether it's true or not. Another factor, the report makes clear, is that from an employers perspective it's easy to mistake the usual labor-market inefficiencies for a worker shortage.
One suspects that if Augustine and like-minded colleagues believed that producing more scientists was bad for American science, they wouldn't be so quick to use the the workforce issue as a bargaining chip in the negotiation for science funding. They are sanguine. "Augustine notes that 'what the [new analysis] does not observe is that an undergraduate degree in [science or] engineering is a prized credential for those who wish to attend business school, law school, medical school or [go into] a number of other fields,'" Bhattacharjee writes. "If the Gathering Storm report is incorrect, we will end up having devoted additional dollars to improving our children's education and to the discovery of new knowledge. On the other hand, if Drs. Lowell and Salzman are wrong, America may well face a serious growth in unemployment and a commensurate decline in its standard of living." So Augustine sees the NAS position -- expressed in the Gathering Storm report -- as the safe route.
But such arguments overlook a key point. Indicators already show that the factors that influence the desirability of a scientific career have deteriorated in recent years -- a trend further expansion of the labor supply will exacerbate.
(See, for example, Richard Freeman, et al., in “Where Do New US-Trained Science-Engineering PhDs come from?”, NBER Working Paper No. 10554 June 2004; Freeman's "Does Globalization of the Scientific/Engineering Workforce Threaten U.S. Economic Leadership?" in Innovation Policy and The Economy v.6, NBER/MIT Press; and Espenshade's "High-End Immigrants and the Shortage of Skilled Labor," Office of Population Research, Working Paper No. 99-5. Espenshade's article establishes that real wages for S&E workers have declined over 2 decades; Freeman's work establishes that decline as a factor in the shrinking number of native-born Americans seeking employment in science and engineering. A 1997 article by Geoff Davis posits that a decline in mathematics enrollments was partly caused by falling salaries for mathematicians. )
Training more scientists in a market where good, permanent jobs are already scarce and competition is already tough causes salaries to fall and insecurity to rise. Train more scientists and engineers, and jobs in science and engineering become less desirable. The best and brightest choose different careers. As Yogi Berra once said, nobody ever goes there anymore -- it's too crowded.
The only way American science will remain healthy is if scientific research remains an elite and attractive profession. That won't happen if the labor market remains -- or becomes increasingly -- glutted. To Augustine, a former CEO of a large, science-based corporation, expanding the labor supply may seem like the safe play. But it's not without risks. Despite what Augustine implies, if the Gathering Storm report is incorrect but we act on its recommendations anyway, more scientists will be unemployed. We will cheapen and compromise a profession that's already under stress -- one that's crucial to the economic security of the United States.
