Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2004 23:26:41 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: the myth of postgraduate degrees To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter The industry lobbyists have always emphasized that one reason the nation "needs" H-1Bs is a claimed "shortage" of workers with Master's and PhD degrees (which I will refer to simply as "graduate degrees" below). Currently the lobbyists are putting even greater focus on this claim, and are pushing Congress to enact a bill now before it, which would exempt from the H-1B cap those foreign nationals who have a greater degree from a U.S. university. It is very clear that the lobbyists are pushing hard on this one. There have persuaded about a dozen newspapers to write editorials supporting the bill. All the editorials are nearly identical, taken largely from the fancy and expensive press kits which the lobbyists have been providing journalists. Thus this issue has become a central one to H-1B, no matter what one's view is on the H-1B program. We are fortunate in that recently there have been two excellent and timely articles on the topic of foreign students in U.S. graduate programs, which I am enclosing below. The two articles are rarities, in that in the vast majority of cases the gullible press simply takes what the press tells them at face value. These two articles take a much more probing look. Again, this has become a central issue in the H-1B dialog, so it deserves an in-depth treatment. I thus ask for your patience in reading this posting. The first of the two articles chronologically was in the Chronicle for Higher Education (CHE). Again, given that so few articles ever do raise questions about the issue of foreign graduate students--the press usually just take the claims of academia at face value--and given the rather conservative, don't-rock-the-boat nature of CHE, I was pleasantly surprised to see the article. (Unfortunately, in the same issue, there is also an article on a projected "shortage" of engineers.) Then an even better article came out yesterday in CNet News. I'm enclosing both articles below. Much has been written about an alleged anti-intellectual streak in American culture, and there is probably some grain of truth in that. American jokes along these lines, e.g. that "PhD" stands for "piled high and deep," would not bring much laughter, if any, in East Asia. Nevertheless, polls have shown that the American people rank university professors as the most-admired profession (tied with physicians). Accordingly, when universities say they "need" foreign students to populate U.S. graduate programs in science and engineering, the gullible public readily believes it. Indeed, some subscribers of this e-newsletter have this attitude. Unfortunately, that trust the public has toward academia is misplaced. The fact is that those academics making such claims are speaking only for their own agenda, rather than the good of the nation. Here is what is really going on: The core activity of PhD-granting universities is research. I must say that I fully agree that research should indeed be an integral part of a professor's job, and it is something I very much enjoy. But the original idea of research was to do it as scholars, not as empire builders, the latter being what it has become. Since it's baseball season now, let me make a baseball analogy. Research money and PhD production (which again is basically research) are to university professors what batting average and ERA are to baseball players. A professor's tenure and subsequent rise in the ranks will depend heavily on bringing in federal and industrial research funding, and on producing PhDs. And the production of PhDs costs money (they are paid a stipend), which brings us back to research funding again. So, as always, it boils down to money (or if you like, money and power). And it's not just at the professor level. The department chair will also be judged on these same factors, totaled over the department as a whole. The same will be true for the dean, and for the university president, who is the "CEO," and who will be judged on bringing in funding just as much as a CEO is judged by the company's stock price. And of course, the president also works to bring in alumni donations too. Did you naively think the president's job is to worry about curriculum, challenging young minds, etc.? No, the president's job is to bring in money, money, money. So of course people at all levels of the university have to make nice with industry, for instance. That is one of the reasons (there are other ones too, all just as selfish) that academia has supported industry's claims of a tech shortage, of a "need" for H-1Bs, etc. (See Sec. 2.2 of my updated congressional testimony, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html) But isn't research necessary for the advances in technology, and thus vital to our economy? Well, I can certainly say the answer is for the most part NO in my fields of expertise--computer science, statistics and mathematics. My inclusion of computer science in that list may surprise some readers, but the facts are that * Very little CS research ends up being used in practice. * Most of the major advances in CS have been initiated in industry, not academia (though in some cases university research has later refined what industry invented). * Most of the major advances in CS have been made by people who did not have a PhD in the field. So, at least in the fields of my expertise (medicine, for example, may be different), the public benefit from all that empire-building in academia is pretty limited. And the negative impacts are serious: * Swelling of the labor pool of scientists and engineers, many of whom suffer from chronic unemployment, and often permanent lack of opportunity to work in their field. * Federal government needlessly spending of huge sums of money on research. * As mentioned earlier, the industry lobbyists use this "shortage of PhDs" argument to get Congress to maintain and expand liberal H-1B policies. As we speak, there is a bill to exempt foreign students who get graduate degrees from U.S. universities from the H-1B cap. (See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/GradDegrees.txt for my earlier posting on why this bill is unwarranted.) Some of you will recall that the National Reseach Council found that it just doesn't pay for American students to pursue a PhD in the tech areas. By foregoing an industry-level salary during the five years or so it takes to get a PhD, an American student is incurring a financial loss that he/she will never make up in a lifetime in the field (assuming that he/she can actually stay in the field that long, which is unlikely). Foreign students hope to get nonmonetary compensation in the form of fast track to a green card, so things are different for them. Coupling the financial loss issue with the fact that one does not need a PhD in order to be technologically capable of working in the field, most American students--including the best ones--vote with their feet, going into the industry after getting their Bachelor's, rather than pursuing graduate study. Thus the fact, often mentioned by industry lobbyists, that a hefty percentage of U.S. PhDs are granted to foreign students, does NOT show that there is "something wrong" with American students, who are merely making a rational decision. And it does NOT imply that we actually NEED all those foreign graduate students, or so many domestic graduate students either. The only entity which "needs" graduate students is the universities, not the nation. The academic lobbyists who claim a "shortage" of PhD students do so for their own reasons, as I said. The same is true for industry lobbyists, who want to use the alleged "shortage" to buttress their demands that Congress expand the H-1B program. The fact is that there are very few jobs in industry which require a PhD. Intel's statements, e.g from the article below But others, including computer industry leaders, defend the use of foreign talent and suggest the drop in doctoral degrees is a sign the country's tech leadership may be in jeopardy. Intel CEO Craig Barrett has weighed in on the issue to say that "the U.S. is basically complacent" about education and research. fly in the face of its behavior. Recall my point, for instance, that on October 13, 1999, a team of Intel engineers recruiting for new graduates visiting my department at UC Davis. I mentioned that I had a couple of PhDs in electrical engineering I could refer to them, one a new graduate and the other a 1992 graduate. One of the recruiters replied, "No, Intel is not very interested in PhDs." The other added that a PhD would not have enough to challenge him or her at Intel, except in the rare case of very highly specialized research areas. In almost all cases PhDs in CS do work which does not need a PhD. Overproduction of computer science PhD's was a major theme in an article by Professor Anthony Ralston of the State University of New York at Buffalo in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (March 1996), the ACM's flagship professional journal. Ralston wrote: [In the coming years] we are almost certain to continue to produce more - probably far more - PhDs in computer science than will be able to find the kinds of research jobs which attracted them to seek doctorates in the first place, and perhaps more than will be able to find jobs at all. Many of us are, in fact, accepting students under false pretenses... Ralston went on the say that the PhDs may still be hired for computing jobs that do not need a PhD, but countered, "But does this justify the cost - to taxpayers, to government, to the students themselves - when the attainment of a PhD adds little to the abilities of the candidates to do [these] jobs?" The simplest way to counter the claims that we have a "shortage" of techies with graduate degrees is to put out how many people who DO have those degrees can't get technical work. I think a short case study is worth inserting here. I recently heard by e-mail from someone who got his PhD in our department about 10 years ago. It so happens that he was a foreign student at the time, but that really isn't very relevant now. In my opinion, he was one of our better PhDs--very smart and industrious. So, what is he doing today with all that high-powered PhD education? Doing R&D at a major firm, bringing the firm a string of valuable patents? No! He's in the sales department. And just a couple of weeks ago I ran into one of our better Master's graduates (this one had been a domestic student). Turns out that he is in marketing. I've seen this pattern again and again. Within a few years of graduation, many are out of the technical area (or out of the field entirely), and those who are in the technical area are not doing work which makes use of their graduate study. In fact, most have never done work which makes use of their graduate study. Some of you will also recall that our National Science Foundation, one of the main federal agencies funding university research in technlogy, has been a heavy promoter of the H-1B program and of the importation of foreign scientists and engineers. And amazingly, the NSF--our own government!--has stated that the reason for bringing in the foreign scientists and engineers is to keep PhD salaries down. See the quotes of Eric Weinstein in the CNet article enclosed below, and his paper, at http://nber.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/Papers/SG/NSF.html That same NSF document correctly noted that one of the effects of implementing the NSF's idea to bring in more foreign scientists and engineers and thus reduce PhD salaries would be to discourage domestic students from pursuing graduate study. Yet since that time the NSF has had the gall to complain that not enough domestic students pursue graduate study! As detailed in the enclosed CHE article, and more so in a recent article in the Washington Post which you can read at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Greenberg.txt the NSF was sharply rebuked by Congress in the early 1990s for falsely predicting an engineer shortage during the late 1980s. There were mass layoffs of engineers by the time Congress called the NSF on the carpet. Note by the way that even though we are in a similar situation today--the industry claimed a shortage in the late 1990s, and now we have mass layoffs--you will NOT see Congress holding an indignant hearing on why it was deceived. Congress has been bought off by the industry, as some of its members have admitted publicly. As I've said many times, lobbyists know well that it is easy to mesmerize the public in any argument by Pushing the Education Button. At that point, those listening or reading go into a trance, and lose all ability to conduct logical reasoning. Look what is happening in this case here. The shortage shouters say, "The number of PhDs produced each year has decreased. We need to do something about this shortage!" But the hidden premise here is that the original level of PhD production was the "appropriate" one, i.e. that we needed all those PhDs, which is false. But the mesmerized public will never notice that there is a hidden premise there. The CNet article enclosed here is excellent overall and quotes a couple of sources which indicate that we don't have a shortage of PhDs. Yet even this article still seems to buy into the notion that we "need" to produce a lot of PhDs: The United States has become more dependent on foreigners for its most-educated positions in science and engineering... No. It's NOT the "United States" that "depends" on those foreign students; it's the universities, for their own selfish reasons. Now, some comments on specific points in the articles: [John] Miano was a programmer who tried for years to get into computer science doctoral programs. Despite earning a "B" average in college and publishing two technical books, he never was accepted. So he took the law school admission test and promptly won a full scholarship to Seton Hall. The result: one less computer scientist, one more lawyer. I'm not sure what happened in John's case. I know that for schools like the UCs, numerics such as GPA generally count much more than things like writing technical books. (I have one of John's technical books, and it is excellent.) Unfortunately, the "B average" part of this example will be read by some as meaning that American students just aren't qualified to go to graduate school. As I said earlier, in my experience--I served as our department's graduate admissions coordinator for a number of years--historically most of the better students, as with most of the lesser ones, simply aren't interested in graduate school. I say "historically," because in the last few years of the really tough job market, a lot more domestic students have been applying to graduate school; see "Dot-Com Dropouts Go Back to School," by Vanessa Hua, San Francisco Chronicle, January 27, 2002. I've heard some people claim that some faculty prefer to work with foreign students because of the latter's docility, in analogy to the fact that employers like the de facto indentured servitude of H-1Bs. There may be some truth to that, and there are a lot of foreign-born faculty who prefer to work with students of the same nationality. But on the other hand I know of some faculty who really prefer U.S. natives. Next, we see what has become the lobbyists' favorite spin on the slowdown in foreign applicants to U.S. graduate programs--post-9/11 visa tightening, and aggressive courting of foreign students by other countries: According to the National Science Board, other countries are doing more to attract the best brains to their universities. The board also said increased security restrictions are partly behind a slower pace of visas given to students and science and engineering workers since Sept. 11, 2001. And then my counter: Norm Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, says students from abroad are less drawn to America because the country's job opportunities in technology have withered. "The overriding reason most foreign students in science and engineering have come to U.S. graduate programs is not the education, but rather the fact that that U.S. education would lead to a U.S. green card, which in turn would lead to a good U.S. job and a nice material living," Matloff said in an e-mail. "In other words, no tech job market, no foreign students." This is a key point, so let me amplify on it. In particular, I will point to a corroborating source (another article, this one on Tsinghua University in China, which I will discuss later in this posting). First, though, let's discuss the second article enclosed below, from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It begins with an example of a university president making a trip to Taiwan for prospective graduate students. It points out that in the 80s there were tons of graduate students from Taiwan in the U.S., but not now, and it suggests that they would rather go to other countries, and that this is due to things like increased U.S. screening of student visa applicants. What that university president isn't telling you is that decline in the number of Taiwanese graduate students going abroad for study occurred in the mid 1990s--long before 9/11/2001. This was due to the fact that the Taiwan economy had gotten much better. In other words, paraphrasing the 1992 U.S. presidential election, "It's the economy, stupid." Now that the economies in China and India are improving, and the tech job market in the U.S. is awful, Chinese and India students are staying home in much greater numbers than in the past. Lots of articles have missed this point; again, it's unfortunate that the public and the press generally believe anything that academia claims. It's nice that the CNet article enclosed below includes the above material questioning that claim. Unfortunately, the CHE article, which is detailed and obviously attempts to take a fresh look at the issues, did NOT question that claim. That failure in the CHE article is even more disappointing in that another article in THE SAME ISSUE ("A Chinese University, Elite Once More," by Jen Lin-Liu, excerpted below) basically says what I said above, i.e. that the reason fewer Chinese students are coming to the U.S. is that they perceive opportunities in China to be as good as or better than those in the U.S. It's not the U.S. visa issue (though it is mentioned as one of the factors) or that other foreign countries are making better offers (they are mostly staying in China); it is simply a change in economics. Norm http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5299249.html?tag=sas.email Brain drain in tech's future? By Ed Frauenheim CNET News.com August 6, 2004, 4:00 AM PT John Miano's career course is the sort of thing to make tech industry leaders wince and worry about their future work force. Miano was a programmer who tried for years to get into computer science doctoral programs. Despite earning a "B" average in college and publishing two technical books, he never was accepted. So he took the law school admission test and promptly won a full scholarship to Seton Hall. The result: one less computer scientist, one more lawyer. Discussion about technology's future in the United States often centers on problems that eighth graders have in algebra. But there also are concerns that the country's universities are churning out fewer tech-related doctorates, and that the numbers may decline further thanks to fewer foreign doctoral degree candidates--who earn a large portion of science and engineering doctorates at U.S. schools. Two years ago, 24,550 science and engineering doctorates were earned by students attending U.S. universities. That was down from slightly more than 25,500 in 2001 and from a peak of 27,300 in 1998, according to data from the National Science Foundation. More recently, a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools found a 32 percent decrease in applications from international students to U.S. graduate schools for the fall. Analysts offer different explanations for the drop, ranging from declining interest in the sciences among Americans to a temporary shift in the labor market and to financial disincentives to pursue doctorates in science and engineering. The trend doesn't worry everyone. Some observers argue that the country already has plenty of Ph.D.s and that a drop in foreign doctorate students isn't cause for alarm. In fact, some view the influx of foreigners as a source of trouble--such as low salaries for scientists and fewer grad school openings for Americans. But others, including computer industry leaders, defend the use of foreign talent and suggest the drop in doctoral degrees is a sign the country's tech leadership may be in jeopardy. Intel CEO Craig Barrett has weighed in on the issue to say that "the U.S. is basically complacent" about education and research. The National Science Board, an independent body that advises Congress and oversees the NSF, recently warned of a "troubling decline" in the number of U.S. citizens studying to become scientists and engineers, even as the number of jobs requiring science and engineering training grows. "These trends threaten the economic welfare and security of our country," the board concluded. James Foley, chairman of the Computing Research Association and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing, sees the drop in doctorates as one of several red flags in the U.S. research system. "We have potentially big problems ahead of us if we don't pay attention," he said. Not only is Foley concerned about doctoral degree production, he wants an increase in the amount of federal money spent on computer science research. According to a recent analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, all research and development funding agencies in the federal government apart from the Defense and Homeland Security departments face flat funding overall for next year. History lessons The idea that the United States isn't preparing enough tech-related doctorates isn't new. In 1989, the NSF warned of a coming shortfall in both Ph.D.s and bachelor's degrees in the natural sciences and engineering. But critics have dismissed such forecasts as off the mark. "Despite recurring concerns about potential shortages of (scientific, technical, engineering and mathematics) personnel in the U.S. work force, particularly in engineering and information technology, we did not find evidence that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon," concludes a recent report from the Rand think tank. Even so, no one disputes the NSF's latest numbers about science and engineering doctorates. Between 1998 and 2002, the number of science and engineering doctoral degrees awarded to U.S. citizens at U.S. institutions fell 11.9 percent to 14,313, according to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, a nonprofit research group. The number of doctoral degrees conferred in most other fields remained roughly the same in 2002, and has hovered around 15,400 annually since 1998, the NSF said. The United States has become more dependent on foreigners for its most-educated positions in science and engineering. Between 1990 and 2000, the proportion of foreign-born people with Ph.D.s in the science and engineering labor force rose from 24 percent to 38 percent, according to the NSF. However, the pipeline of foreign talent has been shrinking. The U.S. State Department issued 20 percent fewer visas for foreign students in 2001 than in 2000, and the rate fell further between 2001 and 2002, according to the National Science Board. According to the National Science Board, other countries are doing more to attract the best brains to their universities. The board also said increased security restrictions are partly behind a slower pace of visas given to students and science and engineering workers since Sept. 11, 2001. Norm Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, says students from abroad are less drawn to America because the country's job opportunities in technology have withered. "The overriding reason most foreign students in science and engineering have come to U.S. graduate programs is not the education, but rather the fact that that U.S. education would lead to a U.S. green card, which in turn would lead to a good U.S. job and a nice material living," Matloff said in an e-mail. "In other words, no tech job market, no foreign students." Is it the money, smarty? As for why U.S. students aren't going after doctorates as they used to, one need merely follow the money, suggests Eric Weinstein, who has analyzed the issue of high-tech labor for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He says Americans are shunning technology-related doctoral programs because of low wages and poor career prospects. Graduate students in science and engineering can spend five to 10 years earning their doctorates, all the time scraping by on $15,000 to $20,000 annually, he said. Many who earn their degree then end up in postdoctorate research fellowships, which may mean a salary of $30,000. According to Weinstein, the NSF's own data and analysis indicate that wages for graduate students and doctoratal students have been kept artificially low through immigration rules that allowed for a deliberate "glutting" of the scientific labor force. He estimates that a true market wage for graduate students who teach or do research would be $40,000 to $60,000 per year, while many newly minted doctorates should be earning as much as $100,000. Weinstein isn't alone in suspecting financial reasons behind Americans' aversion to doctoratal programs. A 2000 study from the nonprofit National Research Council found disincentives to pursuing advanced degrees in computer science for U.S. students, at least in the short term. The study concluded that someone taking five years to earn a doctorate in computer science--without having to pay tuition or fees--would need about 50 years to catch up in career earnings with someone who goes to work immediately with a bachelor's degree in the field. Not everyone agrees that Americans are turning away from science to snag more dough. People "don't go into science and engineering to make a lot of money," said Eleanor Babco, executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. "They go in because they love science and engineering." Another school of thought holds that overall U.S. doctoratal production is related to swings in the economy. According to this view, the recent drop in doctorates may stem from the economic boom of the 1990s, with people choosing better-paying jobs in the private sector over graduate study. Rand analyst Donna Fossum suggested the downturn around 2000 may have prodded would-be workers back into doctorate programs in a similar fashion. Indeed, NSF data shows that graduate enrollment in science and engineering programs reached a record of nearly 455,400 students in fall 2002, up 6 percent from 2001. Graduate enrollment includes both master's and doctoratal students, but the statistic could signal that doctoratal production is about to rise, Fossum said. "Were they people that got laid off by AOL and decided to go back to school?" What's up, docs? There's also debate about how important those credentials are to the country's future. Breakthroughs in computing lead to economic growth, said Georgia Tech's Foley. He noted that doctoratal students at Georgia Tech are working on problems in information security and the interface between humans and computers. "If we're not leading the charge or at least creating innovation here, we're going to really be up the creek," Foley said. Industry leaders also proclaim the importance of the doctoratal degree. Computer maker Hewlett-Packard, for example, runs a summer intern program that includes about 50 doctorates and doctoral students. The company continues to hire doctorates, especially in its HP Labs research division, said Wayne Johnson, the company's executive director of university relations. Some critics, though, doubt the country needs more PhDs. Much of the important work in technology companies can be handled with people with less training, the argument goes, and there are plenty of still-unemployed techies in the U.S. work force. What's more, the annual output of science and engineering bachelor's degrees rose steadily from 303,800 in the mid-1970s to 398,600 in 2000, according to NSF. "It's not clear to me that just looking at production of Ph.D.s is a good way of assessing innovation," said Rochester Institute of Technology public policy professor Ron Hira. Not surprisingly, what to do about the declining doctoratal numbers depends on who's talking. The National Science Board, in its recent report, called for making a priority of high-quality education in math and science. A number of organizations have called for visa reforms to better welcome foreign students, scientists and scholars. A coalition that includes businesses and trade associations has asked Congress to reform the H-1B visa program, arguing that foreign nationals who have earned master's and doctorate degrees from U.S. universities should be exempt from the program's annual cap. Hira, though, says H-1B visas have fueled the shift of technology work overseas. He suspects anxiety over science and engineering doctorates is a diversion from the offshoring trend of shifting work overseas. "There's a perception we're in a competitive crisis," he said. "The competitive and innovation (argument) has been introduced by companies that want to take offshore outsourcing off the table." Programmer-turned-law-student Miano has a radical idea for what to do about computer science doctoratal programs: Limit the ability of foreign students to attend programs in the first place. Miano, who founded the Programmers Guild activist group, argues that no more than 5 percent of students in U.S. computer science doctoratal programs ought to be foreigners. "The universities are the creators of this problem," Miano said. "They have preferred foreign students over American students." Georgia Tech's Foley, however, argued that American students applying to computer science graduate programs aren't making the grade. "There's just not enough well-qualified U.S. students wanting to go to graduate school (in computer science)," he said. To Weinstein, the key to convincing larger numbers of U.S. students to pursue science and engineering doctorates rather than law or business careers is better pay and career prospects. His own career follows this logic. After earning a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard and a fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he went on to a more lucrative job as the director of quantitative research at a financial services firm, Strativarius Capital Management. Weinstein would boost wages for graduate students and scientists funded by national research institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation--positions that are likely to be protected from the shift of tech work overseas. "Pay scientists the six-figure salaries the market is demanding," Weinstein said, "and you will watch people come out of the woodwork in droves." The Chronicle of Higher Education July 9, 2004 Is There a Science Crisis? Maybe Not Leaders warn of a labor shortage in the U.S., but indicators point to an oversupply By RICHARD MONASTERSKY Last fall the president of the University of Maryland found himself doing something that none of his predecessors would have dreamed of trying. While on a trip to Taiwan, C. Dan Mote Jr. spent part of his time recruiting Taiwanese students to go to the United States for graduate school. "Can you imagine an American university president doing that?" he asks. In 1988 Taiwan sent more students to the United States than did any other foreign country, primarily to study science and engineering. But in the past decade, the flow of talented Taiwanese has started to dry up, and graduate enrollment has declined by 25 percent. "This is a new day we're experiencing," says Mr. Mote. As a former professor of engineering, he is particularly concerned about what the drop portends for the health of science and engineering inthe United States. "The circumstances for our decline are definitely in place," he says, "and we need to do something about the circumstances before this great decline does occur." University presidents, government officials, and heads of industry have joined together in a chorus of concern over the state of science and engineering in the United States. The danger signs are obvious, they say. Fewer U.S. citizens are getting doctorates in those fields. There is increasing competition from other countries for the foreign graduate students who once flocked to the United States. And those changes come when many argue that the United States needs more technically trained people to power its economy. In a report in May, the National Science Board reached the gloomy conclusion that "these trends threaten the economic welfare and security of our country." But such a lamentation has an all-too familiar ring to some experts, and it strikes them as off-key. In the mid-1980s, the National Science Foundation warned that the nation would soon lack enough scientists and engineers to fill the necessary posts in academe -- a forecast that turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Instead, over the past decade,thousands of frustrated researchers have labored in postdoctoral positions at low wages because they could not find jobs in academe or industry. Current data suggest that the new predictions may fare no better than earlier ones. In fact, contrary to prevailing wisdom, which fixes blame on poor training in science and mathematics from kindergarten through the 12th grade, record numbers of Americans are earning bachelor's degrees in science and engineering. And unemployment rates in at least some sectors of science and engineering have topped the charts. "Despiterecurring concerns about potential shortages of STEM [scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics] personnel in the U.S.work force, particularly in engineering and information technology, we did not find evidence that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon," concluded the RAND Corporation in a report this year. "Projections about shortages are a dangerous business," says Paula E. Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University who has tracked employment in science. The inaccuracy of past pronouncements, she says, "creates a woof-woof problem. How many times can you say this and the public will believe it?" In fact, even as science leaders opined about the alarming NSF report from May, the agency announced last week that graduate-student enrollment in science and engineering actually reached a new peak in 2002. Foreign enrollment set a record and so did first-time enrollment for U.S. citizens. "Overall, the declines in total graduate S&E enrollment from 1994 through 1998 have reversed with gains in enrollment every year since 1999," according to the foundation. Given the history of such flip-flops, some observers turn the current concerns on their head and ask whether American academic institutions are training too many scientists and engineers. An editorial in Science this year argued: "We've arranged to produce more knowledge workers than we can employ, creating a labor-excess economy that keeps labor costs down and productivity high. Maybe we keep doing this because in our heart of hearts, we really prefer it this way." Even critics of the gloomy forecasts, however, say that America's science-and-engineering machine faces significant challenges in a world much altered by global competition and increasing diversity at home. The landscape has changed markedly from the days when a group of technically trained white men put another group of white men on the moon. As the number of those men entering science has declined, national leaders have sought to bring more women and minorities into the enterprise. At the same time, the United States has come to rely on an increasing proportion of foreign talent -- a strategy that could prove shortsighted if current restrictions on obtaining visas force international students and researchers to go elsewhere. And even if the visa difficulties fade, leaders both inside and outside academe say the education system in the United States must reform itself to maintain the country's technological edge. The real crisis may not be one of quantity but of quality. "Academic institutions need to change to educate students in a much broader context than they do now," says Warren M. Washington, chair of the National Science Board, which advises the president and Congress and overseesthe National Science Foundation. "You'll be hearing enlightened university presidents talking about this. But down at the department level, there's this focusing only on the narrow sort of discipline objectives. That's where it's going to be hard to make changes." Imported Brainpower Mr. Washington and his colleagues on the board offered a stark vision of the future in their May report, titled "An Emerging and Critical Problem of the Science and Engineering Labor Force." The major sources of their concern reside within a six-pound document called "Science and Engineering Indicators, 2004," a report issued every two years by the National Science Foundation. The board noted in particular a rising reliance on foreign-born talent, a decline in homegrown brainpower, increasing difficulty in attracting overseas scholars, and a looming shortage of scientists and engineers. According to the "Indicators" report, the 2000 census showed a sharp rise in the numbers of foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States. They accounted for 17 percent of bachelor's-degree holders, 29 percent of master's-degree holders, and 38 percent of doctorate holders. A decade earlier, just 24 percent of doctorate holders were born outside the United States. Although imported overseas talent has long helped America, the report raises concerns about the availability of such skilled people in the future.Policy changes since September 11, 2001, coupled with increasing competition for foreign students, make it less certain that the nation will attract international brainpower, according to the NSF. At the same time, the average age of the science-and-engineering work force in America is rising, auguring a wave of job openings. Compounding the situation, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted in 2001 that the number of jobs in science and engineering would grow at a rate three times that of all occupations, on average, producing a 47-percent increase in science-and-engineering jobs by 2010. But the number of U.S.-born students getting doctorates in science and engineering has declined in recent years. The science foundation also pointed to other signs that America's technicaledge is growing dull. For example, the number of science-and-engineering articles published by authors based in the United States remained flat throughout the 1990s, while authors in other nations significantly increased their output. (See article on Page A13.) Recent events have only exacerbated other concerns over America's scientific future. In March a survey of 113 U.S. graduate schools by the Council of Graduate Schools showed a 32-percent drop in the number of foreign applications coming into those schools, particularly from China.This sudden decrease sent a chill through university administrations and faculties across the country. "We are seeing a very significant decline in our ability to get people here who want to come here," says G. Wayne Clough, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We are seeing a decline, we believe, in the number of people who even want to come here, because high-tech economies are showing strength in India and China, as examples, and in other places. We're also seeing a significant increase in the number of talented young people who came from China and Taiwan and India who say they're going back." "We've got an odd set of currents," says Mr. Clough, "that merged at this particular point, and it should concern us all." The Once and Future Shortage Many experts have resisted the urge to jump on the bleakness bandwagon, however. They say they have seen it circle through their neighborhoods in years past, blaring what turned out to be a false alarm. In 1986 Erich Bloch, director of the National Science Foundation, warned, "We are not training enough young scientists and engineers." Four years later he wrote, "At the end of the pipeline, too few new Ph.D.'s are being produced, and an increasing fraction -- over 50 percent in engineering and mathematics -- are foreign students." He also noted that "the demand for engineers, scientists, and technicians is growing about twice as fast as supply and will exceed supply by 35 percent in the year 2000." But it soon became clear that those predictions were about as accurate as long-term weather forecasts. As the 1990s progressed, the lack of science jobs forced increasing numbers of graduate students to continue their training after getting doctorates, sometimes moving from one fellowship to another before landing a more secure position. For example, in 1973 only 27 percent of the people earning biomedical Ph.D.'s went into postdoctoral positions. By 1995 the proportion had jumped to 63 percent. In recent years scientists and engineers in certain sectors have found positions scarce, and jobless rates have sometimes exceeded those in the general population. For the first quarter of 2004, unemployment for computer scientists and systems analysts hit 6.7 percent, a record high. Last year the American Chemical Society concluded that "times arebecoming very tough for the chemical profession," with unemployment rates at an all-time high. With job announcements growing ever scarcer in journals, the proportion of new Ph.D. chemists entering postdoctoral positions jumped by 10 percent from 2002 to 2003. The Bureau of Labor Statistics audited its own success in predicting job needs and found major errors in projections for technical fields. In1990, for example, the bureau forecast that employment in electrical and electronics engineering would grow by 40 percent by the year 2000 -- but the number of jobs actually decreased by 16 percent. Agricultural and food science had 14 percent fewer positions by 2000, even though the bureau projected an increase of 21 percent. Eleanor Babco, executive director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, a nonprofit organization concerned with work-force issues, pays close attention to such data. But she once learned a personal lesson about the perils of predicting employment needs. In 1982 she advised her son to go into petroleum engineering, a field in which the job market was particularly hot. "It was just at the height," she says. "Well, when he came out, it was starting to go down so bad that Exxon hired just one person. We found out the hard way." Past errors make some leaders wary about new claims of a looming shortage, especially of foreign-born scientists. "I'm old enough now that I've heard the crisis before," says Sally Mason, provost of Purdue University who is also a biologist. "I'm just going to wait and see what the data tell us." Purdue, which has the most foreign students of any American public university, has seen a decline in the number of applications to its graduate school this year. Part of the cause, Ms. Mason says, may be the university's decision to impose an application fee, which could have discouraged less-qualified students from applying. The university still receives far more international applicants than the number of available slots, and the application fee has had an added benefit. "We're getting a much more serious group of students who are applying for our graduate programs than in the past," Ms. Mason says. "Next fall I don't think our class of international graduate students will be much smaller, if at all." Claudia I. Mitchell-Kernan, dean of the graduate division of the University of California at Los Angeles, says her institution is awaiting new enrollment figures. Last year fewer foreign students applied to the graduate school, but the number who enrolled increased. "As a matter of fact, our numbers have been going up for a decade," she says. For now, the school has far more foreign applicants than it can accept, so enrollments have not dropped. But if the trend continues for several more years, UCLA could see fewer foreign graduate students entering its science and engineering departments, she says. The number of international graduate students enrolling in science and engineering at the University of Texas at Austin fell in 2003, although not because of a supply problem. More foreigners had applied to Texas in 2003 than the year before, but the university chose to admit fewer of them. And even though a quarter fewer foreign students applied to the university this year, it will still turn away nearly 4,000aspiring science-and-engineering graduate students from overseas. Among the nation's public universities, Texas has the second-largest number of foreign students. Foreign Costs Oneof the factors keeping international students out of the university is a state budget crunch, which has reduced the graduate school's ability to offset the costs of educating students, says Victoria E. Rodríguez, dean of graduate studies. The budget problems affected American applicants, too. The university saw an increase in the number of domestic applications for graduate programs this year but admitted slightly fewer of them. At some universities, foreign students in science and engineering end up costing more than domestic students do. Thus, in times of budget shortfalls, universities get more selective. The cost differential is a big factor in California, where the university or departments must pay a portion of the approximately $22,000 out-of-state tuition and feescharged to international students. Through the wondrous complexity of the California system's budget, the tuition money does not go back to each campus in full, so universities end up losing money on foreign graduate students. (U.S. citizens not from California usually qualify as in-state students after their first year and pay only $7,500.) "When it comes down to a foreign student costing two to three times what an American student costs, we're very choosy," says Marvin L. Cohen, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley and president-elect of the American Physical Society. Recent visa restrictions and budget crunches in the United States have made Australia, Canada, and Europe far more enticing to top students around the world, he says: "Right now we're losing students and postdoctoral students of very high abilities to other countries." Leaders in government, academe, and business also worry about a related problem: the growing competition from developing nations, like China and South Korea, that have built up their own research capabilities and are trying to lure their native sons and daughters back home after they train in the United States. But the data contradict the rhetoric. The National Science Foundation reports that 76 percent of international students getting Ph.D.'s intend to stay in the United States now, up from 63 percent a decade ago. Mr. Cohen argues that the United States should not look at those who do return to their own countries as a loss. "If they finish their Ph.D.'s and go back to their home country, then we have a friend for life," he says. "It's a win situation." That's true even in the case of China, he says: "We certainly are in some sort of a competition with China economically. But the people we train that go back, go back with many of our values." Those ideals extend beyond the obvious concepts of democracy into scientific principles, such as "the idea of open collaboration, and sharing, and giving other people a chance to look at your data because you haven't figured it out." Still, the current international problems have hit close to home for Mr. Cohen. One of Mr. Cohen's students went home to China last year to introduce his fiancée to his parents but couldn't get back into the United States for several months because of a visa snafu. So when Mr. Cohen was preparing for a physics conference in Montreal in March, he made calculated decisions about who should attend. Unmarried students and postdocs could go, but married foreign students stayed home, so they would not be separated from their families if visa problems prevented their return. Such troubles have taken their toll, but they may be temporary. Mr. Cohen discussed the issue with President Bush when the physicist received the National Medal of Science in 2001, and the administration recently pledged to resolve student-visa difficulties. What's more, financial pressures in some states have begun to lighten. "Part of the problem is that a lot of these numbers do change quickly" for international students, says B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. "If they changed quickly down, they can indeed change quickly up. So it's always a little risky to be making prognoses about phenomena that are 15 to 20 years out. And we've been there before so many times." The Magnetic Pull of Physics A report issued by the National Science Foundation last week supports Mr. Lowell's concerns. Although the agency warned in May of the declining number of graduate degrees granted to American students, more recent data point to an opposite trend: Increasing numbers of U.S. citizens are now entering graduate school in engineering and every field of science. Enrollment climbed 6.7 percent from 2000 to 2002 for domestic students. Several graduate schools contacted by The Chronicle echoed that conclusion by reporting increasing numbers of U.S. citizens applying for openings in science and engineering. At UCLA, for example, domestic enrollment in those areas has climbed from 1,771 in 1993 to 2,208 in 2003. To a certain extent, universities have expected the numbers to go up slightlybecause of the sluggish U.S. economy. Graduate-school enrollments often spike when jobs disappear. But the trends have exceeded expectations in certain areas. The number of American citizens enrolling in physics graduate programs, for example, surged by 45 percent in the past five years. Roman Czujko, director of the statistical-research center at the American Institute of Physics, says numbers tell only part of the story. Department chairs, he says, talk of a strong increase in the quality of U.S. citizens applying, "so they found themselves admitting quite a few U.S. students." Although the NSF's report shows a declining number of physics doctorates awarded to American citizens in recent years, those numbers should soon climb, says Mr. Czujko. The magnetic pull of physics also has drawn increasing numbers of undergraduates. "Among the things we're excited about is that the undergraduates have gone up 25 percent in five years," he says. The physics trend illustrates a fact not well advertised by the science foundation: While the number of doctorates awarded in science and engineering declined slightly from its peak, in 1998, the number of bachelor's degrees in science and engineering has climbed over the past decade, both in total numbers and for U.S. citizens. "At NSF, I think, they have a perverse focus on doctorates," says Mr. Lowell."Doctorates are not the only ones that run our R&D enterprise." In fact, over the past decade, a slowly growing percentage of bachelor's-degree holders in science and engineering got jobs in those fieldswithout first earning advanced degrees. In engineering, especially, higher-level degrees are not required. According to data collected by the NSF in 2001, 70 percent of engineers entered science-and-engineering jobs with bachelor's degrees. The growing number of undergraduates studying technical fields also contradicts prevailing notions about why more American students do not get doctorates. "The place where the science establishment misreads what's going on is that it implies it's always an education problem: Somehow Americans are not getting good schooling" in elementary and secondary schools, says Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard University. "That's just nonsensical at one level. We have lots and lots of very bright people who could go into science and engineering who don't." Mr. Freeman, like other economists, looks to dollars to make sense of the trends among graduate students. "They're not studying science," he says, "because they look and say, 'Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, with extreme uncertainty working in somebody else's lab, and maybe getting credit for my work and maybe not getting full credit? Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.'s?'" So Many Grad Students Economists and others who track the job market raise a heretical question: Is the United States educating too many scientists and engineers? The surprising answer coming from some quarters is an emphatic yes. An article published this spring in Today's Engineer stated, "Many practicing engineers disagree with the recommendation to increase the number of U.S. citizens pursuing science and engineering studies and careers." With wages stagnant and too few jobs for engineers, adding to the work force will only make those careers less attractive, says one of the authors, George F. McClure, a retired aerospace engineer who studies employment issues for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. "The problem is that everybody has focused on the supply side, and very few have focused on the demand side," he says. "People in colleges and universities are concerned with maintaining the pipeline and throughput." In a case study, Ms. Stephan, the Georgia State economist, has analyzed the growth of the bioinformatics field, generally regarded as one of the hottest areas in science. The number of degree programs blossomed from 21 in 1999 to 74 in 2003. "There's been a tremendous increase in the number of students in these programs," she says. But, she adds, "we also track job announcements in bioinformatics, and they've been declining." She sees parallels to other leading fields. "Everybody is talking right now that there'll be lots and lots of jobs in nanotechnology," she says. "I've not seen a convincing case that that is happening, or that it will happen." Yet graduate schools have an incentive to train ever-increasing numbers of students and postdoctoral fellows because they perform the work on research grants that bring money into universities, Ms. Stephan says. "Academe has a big vested interest here." Even the National Academy of Sciences, one of the cornerstones of the establishment, has acknowledged the conflicts of interest involved in this issue. "These forecasts of undersupply that did not materialize have led policy makers for graduate training and research support to behighly skeptical of any forecasts and to worry about the self-interest of the forecasters," concluded the academy in a 2000 report. Harvard's Mr. Freeman argues that academe and the government need to revamp the system. Students and postdocs, especially from foreign countries, make up a corps of "cheap labor," he says. "It runs the system, and it runs it very efficiently, in terms of the taxpayer." He advocates increasing wages for graduate students and postdocs in order to make careers in science and engineering more attractive to domestic students. Universities as Culprits Mr. Washington, chair of the National Science Board, agrees that universities could be doing a disservice to graduate students. "There's some kind of personal responsibility that professors and departments should have," he says. "They do have a responsibility to ask the question: Are they generating too many students? Or are they are generating students who haven't got the skills to apply for the jobs that are out there?" He and others are urging universities to change the way they educate doctoral students. Jobs in academe are scarce, says Mr. Washington, and as graduate students in science grow ever more specialized, the trend does not prepare them well for the job market. "If someone has a good combination of skills and did a Ph.D. or master's," he says, "they can probably have a much easier time finding a job in industry or government, whereas someone who is a real narrow specialist can't get a job unless they get a job in an academic department. Even then they're not the ideal teacher, because they'll just be creating clones of themselves." Leaders in engineering have reached a similar conclusion. A committee of the National Academy of Engineering recently concluded that an engineer in 2020 will have to range far wider than in the past and will be solving problems in fields as diverse as biotechnology and business. Sharon L. Nunes, vice president for emerging business and research at IBM, who served on the committee, notes that her company has shifted strongly in recent years into the service industry. She sees parallels for engineers in general. "This is really going to open the doors and encourage a lot more young people to consider this as a career," she says, "especially if you think about women and underrepresented minorities, who may now think about engineering as problem solving, not just as the pure technical profession that portrays the geeky engineer that most people think of." The appeal to women and minorities has been a constant refrain of the science bureaucracy for the past 20 years. And while increasing numbers of female, black, and Hispanic students have been heading toward science-and-engineering graduate schools, the nation still has far to go, says Ms. Mitchell-Kernan, of UCLA's graduate division. "There are still substantial gaps between the white, Latino, and African-American populations." The demographics of higher education are shifting in California, as they are all across America, and will soon be dominated by minorities that have traditionally steered away from math and science. That is the challenge that higher education, from universities to two-year colleges, must meet. And although no one can predict how many scientists and engineers the nation will need in 20 years, everyone agrees that the faces of those technical leaders will be far more diverse than those of generations past, and that American universities will scour the world for the best minds. _________________________________________________________________ THE SCIENTIFIC WORK FORCE: IS THE BEAKER HALF FULL OR HALF EMPTY? Some experts worry that the United States will face a shortage of scientists and engineers because American institutions are producing fewer doctorates in those fields. In the past, foreign citizens have helped fill the gap, but visa restrictions since September 11, 2001, have stemmed the flow of foreign students and postdoctoral researchers into the United States. Earned doctorates in science and engineering fields Fever chart Visas issued Fever chart Projected shortages, however, do not take recent trends into account. For example, enrollment in science and engineering graduate programs is rising. And job growth in many fields has not been as strong as anticipated. Record numbers of chemists are currently out of work. Graduate enrollment Fever chart Unemployment rate for chemists* Fever chart * As of March 1 each year SOURCES: National Science Foundation; American Chemical Society _________________________________________________________________ http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 44, Page A10 _________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education The Chronicle of Higher Education: Research & Publishing >From the issue dated July 9, 2004 A Chinese University, Elite Once More Tsinghua U., once stripped of its science programs, now competes with America for graduate students By JEN LIN-LIU Beijing ... As a result, a graduate degree from an American college is not the grand prize that it once was among science students at the university [Tsinghua in China] who now take a more nuanced view toward the opportunity to go abroad. "A lot of students would prefer to remain at Tsinghua rather than go to a lesser-known university in America," says Zhang Quyong, a professor in applied mathematics at Tsinghua. A decade ago, Mr. Wen points out, 60 percent to 70 percent of students in Tsinghua's science departments chose to go to the United States to earn master's degrees or Ph.D.'s in the sciences. This year only about 20 percent of students graduating from his department have opted to do that, while more than half will remain in China for their education. That group includes the department's top two students. Minimizing Risk Students used to have a "herd mentality" when it came to studying in the United States, says Liang Heng, a Ph.D. student in applied mathematics at Tsinghua. But now he and his classmates no longer think of doing so as "always the key to success," he says. "There's a lot of educational opportunities here. It's more about making an individual choice." Several factors have influenced this reversal. According to policy at Chinese universities, students cannot apply to graduate programs here and in the United States at the same time. Before the admissions process begins, they must choose one path or the other. As the United States has tightened visa procedures in recent years, more Chinese students have decided to enroll in domestic graduate schools rather than risk having their visa applications denied. A survey conducted by the U.S.-based Council of Graduate Schools this year found that applications to American universities by Chinese students dropped 76 percent for the fall of 2004 from the previous year. Students are also less inclined to leave as China's standard of living improves. They have "a more balanced idea of what the United States is," says Li Jin, an applied-mathematics professor at Tsinghua. "China is becoming more democratic, human rights are valued more, and the economy is good." ...