Scientific Manpower

Abstract

The most conservative figures on the shortage of engineers suggests that this shortage is now around 95,000 and will reach 156,000 by 1955. A less conservative view of the figures available suggests that this situation might be much worse. The number of new engineers now being produced each year may be actually less than the number lost to engineering activities through death, military service, and transfer to nonengineering duties. We might be 300,000 engineers short by 1955. Since it takes four years to train an engineer, all we can do during the next four years is to make better use of the engineering manpower which will be available. But high-school students are being discouraged from entering the fields of science and engineering by misleading statements of prominent people that science and engineering are the cause of the world's troubles. Engineers and scientists can do much to remove this misapprehension by pointing out that scientists and engineers also work for human welfare and that science and engineering are helping to solve the world's troubles rather than causing them. This must be done and additional scholarship funds be made available before the downward trend in engineering and science enrollments is reversed.

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