Scientific manpower : hearing before the Subcommittee on Science of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Second Congress, first session, July 31, 1991.

  • United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Subcommittee on Science.
Date:
1991
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Scientific manpower : hearing before the Subcommittee on Science of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Second Congress, first session, July 31, 1991. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Mr. BoucHer. Thank you, Dr. Dauffenbach. Mr. Ellis? STATEMENT OF RICHARD A. ELLIS, DIRECTOR OF MANPOWER STUDIES, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ENGINEERING SOCI- ETIES, WASHINGTON, D.C. Mr. Exuis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Sub- committee. I am the Director of Manpower Studies for the American Asso- ciation of Engineering Societies. My job involves the production of research for the Association’s Engineering Manpower Commission. The Commission, or EMC, is over 40 years old. Its members are drawn from engineering societies, industry, universities, and the government—all of them are volunteers. EMC is the main source of data in the United States today on the enrollment and degree production of engineers, and it is also a key source of information on the compensation of engineers. The Commission will hold a major conference in September on supply and demand. It has also created a new task force on the engineer- ing work force, which will work for the next several years on the issues that concern this subcommittee today. The Chair and Vice Chair of that task force, Mr. Fred Schulz and Colonel J.D. Strong are here today. I should note my prepared statement has been cleared through the leadership of the Association of Engineering Societies and the Manpower Commission and is considered representative of the views of those organizations and the member societies that com- prise them. I will not attempt to go through the details of the pre- pared statement which does respond, I think, in some detail to a wide range of the questions posed in the memo that announced this hearing. I'll only hit some highlights and summarize our position here in this oral review, at the moment. If we take the purpose of these hearings as addressing, as Con- gressman Boucher has put it, uncertainties and problems associat- ed with estimates of supply and demand for scientists and engi- neers, I should say the Manpower Commission gets requests on a daily basis for information on those matters from journalists, cor- porate and government planners, scholars, prospective students and their parents. I would like to give the subcommittee some sense of what we have to say to those people, not just what we are saying to you, but what we are saying to the general public. First, current estimates of the supply of scientists and engineers are not providing the details of specialty, experience, or region that most users need. There are gross inconsistencies between the differ- ent Federal sources of data. Of the available estimates, those in the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics are the most useful. And as the memo that announced these hearings indicates, NSF’s data on the technical work force is not very credible. Secondly, on the demand side, the employment projections done every two years in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook are, in our view, the only useful forecasts that we have. This is not to say that they are adequate. They are merely all that is available. In assessed work on projected shortfalls of scientists and engineers