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Do we need more scientists?

Article Excerpt
FOR much of the past two decades, predictions of an impending shortage of scientists and engineers in America have gained increasingly wide currency. The country is failing to produce scientists and engineers in numbers sufficient to fulfill its economic potential, the argument runs. The supposed causes are weaknesses in elementary, secondary, or higher education, inadequate financing of the fields, declining interest in science and engineering among American students, or some combination of these. Thus it is said that the United States must import students, scientists, and engineers from abroad to fill universities and work in the private sector--though even this talent pool may dry up eventually as more foreign nationals find attractive opportunities elsewhere.

Yet alongside such arguments--sometimes in the very same publications in which they appear--one learns of layoffs of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers in the computer, telecommunications, and aerospace industries, of the deep frustration and even anger felt by newly minted Ph.D.s unable to find stable employment in traditional science and engineering career paths, and of senior scientists and engineers who are advising undergraduates against pursuing careers in their own fields. Why the contradictory reports on professions routinely deemed critical to the success of the American economy? Is it possible that there really is no shortage in these fields?

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...

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