U.S. losing lead in science and engineering?

I'm trying to remember if there has ever been a time in the last 25 years when there wasn't some study or article warning about the shortage or lack of US engineering graduates and the dire consequences of this for the US economy. In this case, the article linked from the title is from Reuters and the information source is a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which sounds like a government agency, but is really a private organization. Right away I'm suspicious, for why would people name an organization that way unless they wanted to convey the false impression that they are a government agency? Do they take the same approach with their studies? However, to be fair, my cursory perusal of their web site did not leave any impressions of something underhanded; they seem like a serious organization with a number of high-level researchers. So, I'll leave the issue of their name as a minor point; perhaps someone reading this knows more (assuming anyone is, of course)?

For example, the author of the study holds a named Chair in the Harvard Economics Department. The report would cost $5, so of course I just read the Reuters article and not the full report. I assume Reuters just grabbed some bullet points from its executive summary or press release, anyway (the article reads that way). The gist is that, despite its dominance of engineering and high technology industry and research for the last 50 years, the United States' share of world engineering production is shrinking, and, urgent action is needed to ensure that this does "not undermine America's global economic leadership".

Note that this is talking about all engineering graduates, not just CS, and so it is comparing a currently stable US output with rising outputs in other countries. This is not surprising, considering that:

The study said deteriorating opportunities and comparative wages for young science and engineering graduates has discouraged U.S. students from entering these fields, but not those born in other countries.

So, what is to be done? Produce more graduates to compete for fewer opportunities and lower wages? It doesn't seem that the report suggests this action; at least, the Reuters article doesn't mention it, and the wording is strange, in that the action urged above is to prevent the decreasing share from undermining US economic leadership, not to prevent the share itself from decreasing. The report's abstract has the following closing sentence:

To ease the adjustment to a less dominant position in science and engineering, the US will have to develop new labor market and R&D policies that build on existing strengths and develop new ways of benefitting from scientific and technological advances in other countries.

This seems purposefully vague. Is there something more concrete in the report? Is this code for something that would be obvious to an economist, such as increasing immigration quotas? Anyone want to know badly enough to spend $5 to find out?

Personally, I am skeptical that this will be as much of a crisis as is advertised. Of course the number of engineering graduates in China, for example, will increase greatly in the years to come, and so of course the US share of graduates will decrease. However, the cost of living in major Chinese cities already rivals or exceeds comparable US cities. For example, new condos in the outskirts of Guangzhou can cost well over US$100,000. Chinese engineering graduates aren't stupid. They didn't work like crazy to beat incredible odds to get their degrees to live in third world conditions someplace in the boondocks -- they want comfortable lives in the big cities. I don't imagine that the situation is all that different in India. So, the cost advantage of offshoring will be transitory: enough to jump start high-tech industries in developing countries, but insufficient to do permanent damage to the US engineering profession.

Topics: engineering, profession, careers, globalization.

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