What Engineering Shortage?
“We don’t have enough engineers in the USA!” is a very common sentiment. People see a de-industrializing economy and assume this is due to a lack of workers, a supply problem. I believe cause and effect are swapped and it is actually a demand problem. We have so few engineers because the economy has de-industrialized. Here’s why:
Relatively few people who graduate with engineering degrees work as engineers. The American Society of Engineering Education estimates “approximately half of engineering degree holders work their principal job in engineering” [1]. If there was an engineering shortage, then it’s unlikely that half of engineering grads would pursue a career in a different field.
A few years ago I ran a similar analysis using Department of Education and Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets and concluded the same thing. Almost every engineering discipline graduated many, many more engineers than the economy could absorb. [2] Computing disciplines had large shortages though. This degree-job mismatch is corroborated by economist Ron Hira [3] (fig 1)
If there is a high demand for engineers it stands to reason that wages would increase in response. Economists have noticed the opposite; real wages for engineers are down. (fig 2 and fig 3)
Additionally, unemployment rates for engineers are higher than for other professions. (fig 4)
All of these data point to a surplus of engineers, rather than a shortage. As I mentioned earlier in this post, the industrial base of the United States has been so diminished that engineering grads need to look elsewhere to find work. Anecdotally, this matches my experience. Most of my friends and classmates from engineering school went into consulting, tech, and finance rather than into manufacturing. The lack of engineering jobs is a demand-for-engineers issue, not a supply-of-engineers issue which almost seems harder to fix. If it were a supply issue then America would just have to graduate more engineers. Because it’s likely a demand issue, we need to spin up an industrial base which will take some time and lots of investment.