A commonly heard defense in the arguments that surround U.S. companies that offshore high-tech and engineering jobs is that the U.S. math and science education system is not producing a sufficient number of engineers to fill a corporation's needs.
However, a new study from Duke University calls this argument bunk, stating that there is no shortage of engineers in the United States, and that offshoring is all about cost savings.
This report, entitled "Issues in Science and Technology" and published in the latest National Academy of Sciences magazine further explores the topic of engineering graduation rates of India, China and the United States, the subject of a 2005 Duke study.
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Duke's 2005 study corrected a long-heard myth about India and China graduating 12 times as many engineers as the United States, finding instead that the United States graduates a comparable number.
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"You had the brightest kids worrying about their jobs being outsourced. We thought, if kids at Duke were worried, then let's do a study about what's going on in education," Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at Duke University's master's in engineering management program and a co-author of the study, told eWEEK at the time.
"The first thing you do in a study is you look at the facts. But we couldn't find any facts. The more we dug, the more we looked, the more we discovered there were no facts," said Wadhwa.
However, Duke's 2005 study reported serious problems with the quality of Indian and Chinese bachelor-level engineering graduates, and predicted both shortages in India and unemployment in China. The current report finds these predictions to be accurate, with China's National Reform Commission reporting that the majority of its 2006 graduates will not find work. There are also oft-heard whisperings of a engineering shortage in India, though private colleges and "finishing schools" are going far to make up for the Indian deficiencies, the report said. ...
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