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from Silicon Valley- Engineering shortage? Get real
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from Silicon Valley, 2006. All rights reserved.
The title
of this article caught our eye. With the steady decline in Silicon Valley's work force participation rate being lauded instead as an "improvement" in the unemployment rate, the appeal of this headline was obvious.
While
the body of the article was not exactly on-point with what we expected to find, and the unemployment statistics
they cite reflect again on the labor force participation rate, the origin of the "600,000 engineers per year added
in China" is nonetheless startling.
In turn, if there are really fewer
engineers coming out of Asia, and they are imbued
with such lesser skills, it supports our longstanding premise companies
crying for more H-1B's (or L-1 or converted
J-1 visas) are primarily trying to lower payroll costs, not increase engineering
expertise.
Without
further ado, we hope you enjoy: Engineering shortage? Get real (emphasis added**)
*
* * * * Jim Turley EE Times (01/16/2006 10:00 AM EST)
Despite all the
political posturing and sleight of hand with labor statistics, there's no shortage of trained engineers in the United States.
India and China are not producing new engineers any faster than we are.
Widely circulated articles in everything from
The New York Times, Fortune magazine and the Chicago Tribune, to speeches by Bill Gates and President Bush, have said the
engineering sky is falling and that U.S. engineering schools are in crisis.
Probably not. First of all, it's hard enough
to count the number of graduating engineers in the United States, much less those of other countries. According to the universities
themselves, the number of students graduating with a BS degree in computer science rose by 85 percent between 1998 and 2004.
That's hardly a signpost of decline. The number of BSEE grads has risen by more than 18 percent since 1999. The American Society
for Engineering Education says darn near 120,000 new BS, CS or PhD degrees were handed out to newly minted engineers in 2004.
Sounds like a boom to me.
So how does that compare with the other guys? Nobody knows-or nobody's telling. The prevailing
wisdom seems to be that 600,000 new engineering grads come out of China each year and another 350,000 out of India. But the
figures are probably bogus.
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, the mythical 600,000 figure may
have gotten its start as far back as a 2002 speech given by Cadence's then-CEO, Ray Bingham, who said, "China produces 600,000
engineers a year and 200,000 of them are electrical engineers." That number was uncritically recycled by newspapers
around the world, most of which cited each other as the source. Mr. Bingham himself couldn't recall where his factoid
came from, so it's still apocryphal.
As near as anyone can tell, the other nations' figures-if they're based on
fact at all-include anyone even remotely involved in the study of engineering. The numbers probably include those enrolled
in two-year programs, dropouts, technicians and even empty "seats" in government-approved engineering schools.
Looking
now at the demand side, unemployment among engineers was 2.5 percent in 2004 and 4.3 percent in 2003. Those figures are right
in line with the 2.8 percent and 3.2 percent unemployment rates for all professional occupations in those two years. So, given
that employment rates are entirely average, where's the shortage?
I suspect there isn't one. Recycle a statistic enough
and people will believe it's true, even though 74.3 percent of all statistics are made up.
Jim Turley, editor in chief
of Embedded Systems Design, a sister publication of EE Times.
