“Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate: Placing the United States on a Level Playing Field with Chin and India” — what a powerhouse report from the Duke School of Engineering! A team of faculty and student researchers decided to ask the question: Exactly what is being counted when countries report how many engineering students they’ve graduated in the last year?
In 2004, for example, typical articles, according to the report, stated that the US had graduated about 70,000 undergraduate engineers; China had graduated 600,000. And India had graduated 350,000. The US was doomed to become a technology and research backwater!
Wait, said the Duke team. What’s being measured varies from country to country. When you apply some equivalency to the problem, the outlook is quite different.
Before I get to the numbers, some background. The researchers obtained data from three sources for the study: the Ministry of Education in China; the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in India; and the US Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics.
What they established was that the numbers from India and China also include “sub-baccalaureate degrees” — such as associate degrees in the US, short-cycle (two- or three-year) degrees in China and three-year diplomas in India. The US numbers didn’t.
The students who achieve these degrees typically work as transactional engineers, doing rote and repetitive work.
The report compares that type of graduate to the “dynamic engineer,” somebody who has obtained a four-year degree from a nationally accredited school with research facilities and dedicated faculty. The dynamic engineer is an individual “capable of abstract thinking and high-level problem solving using scientific knowledge. These engineers thrive in teams, work well across international borders, have strong interpersonal skills and are capable of translating technical engineering jargon into common diction.” (Although the report doesn’t state this, I assume the school considers Duke graduates — my sister Karen among them! — the latter type of engineer.)
When you take all the engineering, computer science and information technology degrees awarded in 2004 and add them up, you get the following:
| | US | India | China |
| Bachelor’s degree | 137,437 | 112,000 | 351,537 |
| Sub-baccalaureate degree | 84,898 | 103,000 | 292,569 |
| Total | 222,335 | 215,000 | 644,106 |
In other words, the US whoops the pants off of India, even though India has about three times the population. And a country that’s four times as large — China — only graduates three times as many engineers in one form or another.
What’s it all mean for the US? The report doesn’t offer any grand interpretations. In fact, it says, “There is no definitive answer to what the future holds.” But it does suggest that we’re not in the “desperate state that is routinely portrayed.” Before you Americans start feeling chipper, however, it also says this: “The challenge for the United States over the next decade will be to retain its role as a global pacesetter in the education of engineering and scientific talent and thereby sustain its legacy as a preeminent technological innovator.”
