Quality or quantity? How many engineers do we actually have?

Original Address: Quality vs. Quantity in Engineering

Marvinlee

Every spring, Jitendra Malik, the chair of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, sits down with students who have been admitted to the engineering school to discuss whether they should enroll.

Recently, Malik noticed a recurring theme in the questions asked by students, especially their parents. "They all want to know how the field of engineering or computer science will develop over the next decade," Malik said. They wonder if they are choosing a career that will be outsourced. Why would students who have gained admission to one of the top domestic engineering programs worry about not finding a good job? If even students accepted into Berkeley's engineering department are hesitant to enroll, does this mean that the debate over the increasing number of engineering graduates nationwide is missing the point?

Just turn on the TV and watch Lou Dobbs' nightly CNN program "Exporting America" — now also a book — to understand the students' concerns, where he loudly complains about outsourcing. "The threat to tens of thousands of workers and their families from exporting American jobs to cheap foreign labor markets also threatens the American way of life," the official advertisement for the book claims.

In addition, countless politicians, press releases, and various articles tell students that "last year, more than 600,000 engineering students graduated from universities in China, 350,000 from Indian schools, while only 70,000 graduated in the United States," as pointed out by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in a communication in Newsweek. Politicians from both the left and the right — including Edward Kennedy and Newt Gingrich — rush to quote those numbers, just as the National Academies of Science did in its report titled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," which seemed eager to pass the fears of a flat world onto the White House.

However, a study by two scholars at Duke University suggests that these repeatedly cited figures are misleading, and some experts say that outsourcing will not lead to the end of America. The warnings about the precarious state of American engineering do not make students more disciplined; instead, they scare them into standing still.

In a report that did not receive as much attention from Congress as "The Gathering Storm," the Duke scholars investigated the authenticity of the data regarding the number of graduates. Vivek Wadhwa, an executive in residence at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and one of the authors of "Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate," said that the figure of 600,000 engineering graduates in China dates back to 2002 when Cadence Design Systems CEO Ray Bingham used it in a speech. "People are still citing the same data, but they are simply not accurate," Wadhwa said. The Duke report used data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the National Association [...]