Do We Need More Scientists

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 faiUng 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 PhDs 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?