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The Myth of the Half-Million Chinese Engineer Grads
March 5, 2008 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Tell me if this statistic sounds familiar:
The U.S. lags far behind China and India when it comes to graduating engineers. In fact, China graduates roughly 600,000 engineers each year, while India clocks in with 350,000 engineer grads annually. The U.S. graduates a paltry 70,000 engineers. No wonder we're losing our competitive edge!
If those numbers sound familiar, it's no wonder. They've been floating around for years, long before Fortune magazine cited them in a July 2005 cover story about 2004 engineering grad rates. The figures were picked up by anchormen, congressmen, analysts, and even a few electronics writers. Yes, I cited these statistics a few times in columns and on panel discussions at conferences.
I certainly believed it. If Fortune said it, it must be so. These stats made sense, and what's more, they fit a pre-existing bias. Remember, this was back in 2005, when it seemed that China - and India, to a lesser extent - could do no wrong. They were huge countries seemingly packed with hundreds of thousands of engineers who were going to run us all into the poor house.
But a lot of scholars and engineers had their doubts about these figures - even with over a billion people in China, a half-million engineering grads is a lot for one country. And where were all these graduates going when they left the university?
Researchers at Duke University went to work on the numbers, using actual science. They contacted the universities in China and India, and analyzed their areas of specialization and graduation rates. They studied and refined their own methodology. The Dukies quickly determined that the word "engineer" often doesn't mean the same thing in China as it does in the U.S.
The results were included in a study titled "Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate." This report determined that in 2004, China graduated 351,537 engineers with at least a bachelor's degree, while India produced 112,000. And the U.S. graduated 137,437 engineers that year.
How could the numbers be so far off, with the U.S. passing India in total engineering grads? The "bad" numbers were based on figures provided with China's Ministry of Education and India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, two agencies not known for circulating bad data. But their data did not work well in country-to-country comparisons.
Beijing and New Delhi counted as "engineers" thousands of grads who would hold the job function of "technician" or "specialist" in the U.S. For instance, China's numbers likely included degreed auto mechanics among its 644,106 total for 2004. And many Chinese and Indian grads had three-year degrees, similar to an associate's degree in the U.S. - China listed 292,569 of these as engineering graduates.
The word "engineer" doesn't even translate well among dialects within China; an engineer in Shanghai isn't necessarily the same as an engineer in the distant provinces. China's Ministry of Education admitted that it merely added up the numbers of engineer grads reported by each province; provinces didn't have to provide majors, and there was no standard definition of what constituted an engineer.
So, the final tally for China and India dropped, and the total for the U.S. rose. In fact, the U.S. graduates more engineers per million citizens than either China or India.
Now that's one statistic we need to hear more often. I'll say it again: The U.S. graduates more engineers per million citizens than either China or India.
Tell someone today.