The Huntsville Times printed this op-ed written by Dan Smith, president of Raytheon Integrated Defense System. In his editorial Smith breathlessly lectures us about how China is graduating 500,000 engineers while the U.S. only churns out 70,000. He says that he got the number from a Nation Academy of Sciences study. Actually, the study he is referring to said that China graduated 600,000 engineers (press release here and full report here), but even that widely reported study has been disproven. In other words, Mr. Smith got the wrong number wrong.

Duke University had a team of students investigate the number reported in the NAS study. Their findings suggested that the true numbers were a bit more in line with reasonable expectations.

We found that the U.S. was graduating 222,335 engineers, vs. 215,000 from India. The closest comparable number reported by China is 644,106, but it includes additional majors. Looking strictly at four-year degrees and without considering accreditation or quality, the U.S. graduated 137,437 engineers, vs. 112,000 from India. China reported 351,537 under a broader category. All of these numbers include information technology and related majors.

You can read Duke’s full report here or listen to an NPR story about their research here. As the NPR story points out, the central government in China simply ordained that 600,000 engineers was their desired number and the various school heads responsible for reporting just told them what they wanted to hear. In some cases they counted repairmen and factory laborers as engineering students. In the end China’s engineering graduation rate is no threat to us. The NPR story points out that although China graduates two and a half times the number of engineers as the U.S. their population is four times ours. Hardly a cause for concern.

I hope Mr. Smith is a little more careful with his taxpayer funded work.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 6:11 am and is filed under Education, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.