Well, the numbers may not be too far off the mark. When I was graduating high school (1993), the state I lived in in India had an entrance test for engineering admissions. It announced about 20,000 ranks, to fill a corresponding number of seats. If one projects these figures throughout the country would be about 150,000 in 1993. I think the capacity has grown since.

However, the question of quality is legitimate. Indian colleges are not very well funded in comparison to American universities, and there is quite tremendous variation in their quality. However, I get the impression that there have been improvements in this regard.

Finally, while quality may be an issue, I think a comparison of the American workforce with the pool in India is not entirely valid. The economies of the two countries are in different stages of development, and consequently technological needs also vary. In addition, the US has built up tremendous capacity in terms of manpower and trained talent over the last 100 years. I don't think either India or China have this level of technological depth. Consequently talk of competition in cutting edge technology is somewhat premature. I also think that the higher education market in India is predominantly market driven, so marked changes in quality of the bulk workforce will need to be driven by a demand for the same.

Whatever the numbers actually are there’s a conceptual problem here. Manufacturing (where you employ engineers) is shrinking as a percentage not just of US or European GDP but as a percentage of world GDP. It’s simply becoming less important all round.
Focusing on how many engineers China and India produce as a predictor of how rich or large their economies will be in future years is rather like someone, 70-80 years ago, focusing on how many farmers are being trained as agriculture shrank from 20% of the economy to 2% since then. Just not a relevant indicator.

"Compared with engineering graduates in Europe and North America, who work in teams to achieve practical solutions,"
LOL!
Not only is that wrong, at least in computer science, where at least in Australia the amount of teamwork varies from university to university, but I would be extremely wary of claiming that teamwork is a better way of get good graduates. Teamwork has the small flaw in that good members of a group can carry bad members, which is great if your goal is to get a finished product out of the team, but terrible if you want to grade individual members.

Suppose the scary numbers are right, not wrong - how's that bad for the US?

If a Chinese engineer invents a room temperature superconductor, or an Indian one finds a cure for cancer, then I win big time, even thought I'm an American.

This is just intellectual mercantilism, and it's as wrong today as it was back in the gold dubloon era 200 years ago.

Hi -

Been there, done that. If you go back to the 1970s into the 1980s, the Soviets were going to overwhelm the west not because their political system was better, but rather because they were training so many more engineers, mathematicians and scientists.

And they were. But they weren't. The level of qualification was significantly lower (not on paper, but in reality: engineers that rote-learned their trade, rather than learning how to solve problems) and as a result the productivity was also significantly lower. Couple that with the fact that the system more or less conspired to prevent productive work, and you know why the "threat" dissapated.

That's not to say that the US produces "enough" engineers, mathematicians and scientists: it doesn't. But holding up a foreign threat to try to motivate increasing spending levels is fairly weak: it'd be a lot better of you argue for domestic reasons.

John

Don't the comments above miss the point? One would expect emerging powers with rapidly growing economies to start producing more engineers (among other things). I suppose one might expect as well that the quality of their education and training would vary somewhat. But this will change, and we couldn't do anything about it even if we wanted to.

The thing we could do something about is the number of new Americans engineers. Is that figure of 70,000 accurate? Is that enough? Are new American engineers educated and trained better than their foreign counterparts? If the latter two questions are answered in the negative, what needs to be done in response?

There's also the question of demand. China is arguably at an engineering-intensive stage of development right now (especially civil engineering and electrical power engineering) because so much infrastructure needs to be build. Each new bridge, each new railroad spur, each new powerplant, are all going to require engineering talent.

Yes, we have infrastructure issues here, too, but nothing, I suspect, like China does.

Graduate students from China and India out number Americans in American universities. I'm not saying thats a bad thing, but if you're going to look at differences in education you might want to look at those numbers too.

Another issue: Chinese universities outside of a few general universities (BeiDa, Fudan in Shanghai) are often very tightly focused: they have shipbuilding universities, "transportation" (Jiao Tong) universities, political science universities, aerospace universities, foreign language universities, etc. The result of this is a very narrow and specialized degree that is inevitably several years out of date.

Courses of study are completely scripted, with few or no electives, and due to funding problems, students rarely get to do much work in labs. There are frequently no general education requirements outside the major, so - for example - it is very rare for engineers to have any background in economics beyond the Marxist silliness they learned in high school.

I don't know why everyone asserts the US doesn't graduate "enough" engineers. If so, wouldn't salaries rise to compensate?

I'm an engineer, and I don't understand how we got infantilized like farmers. The US dominates most sciences with fewer and fewer resources. How is that a bad thing?

While I do see China as a major strategic competitor to the status-quo powers (mainly US & EU), some things (like the graduate student situation) seem slightly overblown, at least for now.

Check out Econobrowser, which points out some doubts to China's latest GDP Growth numbers.

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/10/china_gdp_stati.html

The biggest threat from the Chinese is that they have no need or much desire to follow any rules.

Intellectual property - steal it.

Worker protectiontions - ignore them.

Currency manipulation - absolutely.

Rule of law - for someone else.

The real measure is not the diplomas, but were those "graduates" are at the 5-yr and 10-yr-mark in their careers. A "graduate engineer" manning a fast-food counter, or a manufacturing-plant machine-tool is not an "engineer" to the National Economy. In my own profession, less than 10% of the declared college majors are still in the profession even 5-ys out of school. Many never even complete their major, but transfer to other disciplines. And less than 15% of the actual graduates are still in the profession after 10-years.

For once I agree with save_the_rustbelt

There is one thing that I do find significantly worrying:

Much like in the international security field, the "solution" of the economist field seems content to say something along the lines of "Okay, look, it's not a problem RIGHT NOW" and leave the argument at that...the implicit logic seems to be "wait til it IS a problem and THEN worry about it..." Can't we be a bit proactive on this?