[1fastredsc]

So this semester along with my other classes, i'm in an ME senior seminar class. It's a 1 credit course that meets once a week for one hour to listen to engineers in the field give lectures and also get general guidance as to our direction after we graduate. Now i have this class on fridays, and have had all weekend including holiday to think about the subject discussed, but then i thought i'd open a thread for discussion on the topic.

Here is the deal, the head of our department teaches the course and for our first class he gave his own lecture with advice, outlook, and general opinion based on his personal career. Part of his outlook included talking about free trade and the kinds of things that we need to be aware of as a result. He presented a graph of different nations and the number of degreed engineers in their population from the 80's to 2002. We were hovering around 70k constantly, and surprisingly enough japan being the small country that they are, 130M people, they had slightly more engineers. But that isn't the disturbing part, the disturbing part is that china from the 90's has sky rocketed with degreed engineers. So much so that at the end of the graph in 2002 they are in the 200k range with a steep upward slope. Then he tells us that as of last year, 2007, they are estimated at having 500k degreed engineers. So, even considering that they have a larger population of 1.3B people, which is a little more than 4 times our population of 300M, they still have a higher percentage of engineers per population. At there 500k and our 70k, they stand a little over 7 times the number of engineers.

This brings his obvious concern as an educator of why our numbers haven't increased steadily with population growth. He said what's even worse is that there are more people with degrees in sports journalism than engineering (no offense to anyone in sports journalism, just used for reference), and when i say engineering i'm talking about all the different disciplines added up into one (ME, ChemE, EE, CE, etc). He said that every semester they try new things to keep there incoming students (trying different professors, books, methods, etc), but a lot of them end up leaving for other departments after a semester or two. So the resulting question is, why don't we have more degreed engineers? Why are kids leaving and going to other departments? Are scientists, lawyers, MDs, and other "difficult" fields seeing the same trend or are they growing steadily with the population? And lastly, if there are more degreed engineers there, then their is a higher supply of labor and therefore they can be paid much less. So will engineering jobs be possibly next on the outsourcing chopping block?