In the 1980s, a National Science Foundation study, motivated by concern about possible future increases in the cost of hiring scientists, raised another false alarm about looming shortages. Denounced by experts for methodological flaws and ultimately disavowed by an nsf director in congressional testimony, the study nonetheless bolstered support for the 1990 Immigration Act that reshaped national policy to admit more foreign scientists and engineers.

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In fact, American college students have for decades shown strong and consistent interest in STEM; year after year, just under a third of all college students in this country earn degrees in those subjects. But, ironically, dismal career prospects drive many of the best of those students to more promising professions, such as medicine, law, or finance.

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The latest shortage panic began with the 2005 publication of Rising Above the Gathering Storm, an almost freakishly influential National Academies report bemoaning the supposed inability of the American educational system to fill the nation’s need for STEM workers and meet the perceived challenge of India and China to American technological supremacy. The report, produced by a committee headed by Norman Augustine, a retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, immediately grabbed media attention.

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There was another study of the scientific workforce published in 2005 by the National Academies, however, that was mostly ignored by the press. Bridges to Independence, produced by a committee chaired by Thomas Cech, the Nobel laureate in chemistry, documented a genuine shortage not of homegrown scientists but of viable career opportunities for those scientists. It also detailed the damage that the resulting “crisis of expectation” for young PhDs trapped in an overcrowded job market was doing to the nation’s research enterprise.

Full article: http://www.cjr.org/reports/what_scientist_shortage.php?page=all