by Daniel Bell
SOURCE: OECD, Reviews of National Science Policy: United States, p. 211.
TABLE 3-14
Number of Scientists and Engineers, by Employment Status and by Field and
Full-time Equivalent Number of Scientists and Engineers, by Function,
in Universities and Colleges, 1965 (Thousands)
SOURCE: OECD, Reviews of National Science Policy: United States, p. 510.
aLess than 50.
The central group of the knowledge class are the individuals listed in the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel maintained by the National Science Foundation. These are the individuals who have the specialized talents that the government deems important to keep track of. They are, as the title of a NSF study indicates, America’s Science Manpower. They are the upper class in the “Scientific City” of the day. As of 1968, they totalled 297,942 persons. In terms of disciplines, this is the breakdown:
Physical sciences 53 percent
Chemistry 32
Physics 11
Earth and marine 8
Atmosphere and space 2
Life sciences 20 percent
Biological 16
Agricultural 4
Mathematics and computer 11 percent
Mathematics 8
Computer 2
Statistics 1
Social sciences 17 percent
Psychology 8
Economics 4
Political science 2
Sociology 2
Linguistics 1
Anthropology
The key figures are tabulated in Table 3-15. This provides a comprehensive overview of the scientific elite by numbers in each field, and the proportion of Ph.D. degree holders to all persons listed in the National Register.
This central group numbers 300,000 persons. One can say they have the crucial competences and the major talents of science. What is striking is that more than half of them are in the physical sciences, while only 17 percent are in the social sciences (half of these being psychologists). Since the end of World War II, the government has tended to concentrate its rewards in the physical sciences and the major graduate student aid has gone to those fields. Yet a change is now evident. In the recent years the major shift has been to the biological sciences and in the most recent period there has been an increase in the proportion of Ph.D. degrees in the life science field. Yet, inevitably, the necessary concerns with social policy will foster an increase in the number of economists and sociologists in the country.
If one looks at this central group, only 37 percent, as of 1968, possessed a Ph.D. An additional 29 percent had reached the master’s level, and 30 percent held a bachelor’s degree. These proportions can be expected to change over time, with a higher number, after the 1970s, holding higher degrees.
In the area of primary work activity, 32 percent are engaged in research and development, 21 percent in management and administration and 21 percent in teaching. Within the smaller group of Ph.D. holders some further refinements can be observed. Thus, the social sciences have a higher proportion of Ph.D. holders to total registrants than do the physical and natural sciences. For example, 95 percent of the anthropologists in the register have Ph.D.s, compared to 28 percent of the mathematicians or 53 percent of the economists. This difference reflects the fact that where employment opportunities are primarily in universities, as in the social sciences, the greater is the percentage of persons in those fields who hold a Ph.D. One-half (52 percent) of the doctorate scientists were in the physical and mathematical sciences, one-third were in the life sciences, and 11 percent were in the social sciences.
TABLE 3-15
Percentage of Ph.D. Degree Holders to Total NSF Registrants by Field, 1968
SOURCE: American Science Manpower, 1968. A Report of the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel, National Science Foundation (Washington, D.C., 1970), NSF 70-50, p. 23.
In terms of the type of employer (Table 3-16), more than half (58 percent) of the “upper class,’ the doctorate holders, were employed by educational institutions, and only 22 percent were employed by industry and business, a sharp contrast to the general occupational pattern of the “Scientific City ’ as a whole.
In terms of primary work activity of the “upper class” (Table 3-17), one-half (57 percent) of the doctorate holders were engaged primarily in some phase of research and development (compared to one-third of the “Scientific City”); and 30 percent of the doctorate holders reported teaching as their primary work activity.
TABLE 3-16
Percentage of Ph.D. Degree Holders to Total
NSF Register by Type of Employer, 1968
SOURCE: American Science Manpower, 1970, p. 23.
TABLE 3-17
Percentage of PhD. Degree Holders to Total
NSF Registera by Primary Work Activity, 1968
SOURCE: American Science Manpower, 1970, p. 24.
NOTE: Subfigures are in parentheses. The totals of the sub-figures do not always add up to the inclusive totals because of rounding.
aTotal NSF Register is given in Tables 3-15 and 3-16.
In sum, we find that the place of the educated elite is at sharp variance with the population as a whole. Less than one-fourth are employed in business and more than half are in the universities; 24 percent are in basic research and half of them are involved in some form of research and development. While it would be too crude to say that business and the universities form completely different or even contrasting mentalities, it is clear that the norms of the two are different, and more importantly the social pressures (or to put the issue more technically, the “reference group”) of the two differ. The ethos of the university is primarily liberal and while under that umbrella there is a wide spectrum of political differences, in most respects the elite is responsive largely to the ethos of its milieu. If one believes, as does Robert Heilbroner, that the expansion of science and scientifically based technology is creating the framework for a new social order that will erode capitalism, as the activities of the merchants and the bourgeois outside the landed economy undermined feudalism, then the significant fact is that most of the activities of science are outside the business system and the organization of science policy is not, in the first instance, responsive to business demand.76 The necessary foundation for any new class is to have an independent institutional base outside the old dominant order. For the scientist this base has been the university. Whether the scientific community will be strong enough to maintain that independence remains to be seen. It is a question 1 return to in the Coda to this book.
THE FUTURE PROFILE OF THE HIGHER EDUCATED
The major problem for the post-industrial society will be adequate numbers of trained persons of professional and technical caliber. We assume, despite momentary dips, a continuing demand into the foreseeable future—and this is unique in human history. The expansion of the science-based industries will require more engineers, chemists, and mathematicians. The needs for social planning—in education, medicine, and urban affairs—will require large numbers of persons trained in the social and biological sciences. As the 1966 Manpower Report said:
Growth in research and development ... can be expected to demand ever-rising number of experts in many professional and technical disciplines. In addition, greater number of city planners, engineers, and architects will be needed to rebuild and redesign blighted areas of many of our major metropolitan centers. Talents of a wide range of social scientists will be used to redeem human resources in these cities. Many more teachers will be needed. Among other occupations due for major increases are those involving personnel necessary to implement the new medicare program and other programs developed by Federal, State and local government agencies to improve the health of the Nation’s citizens.77
Short-range forecasts are fairly common. The college graduates of 1980 are already in high schools and one makes rough estimates of the proportion of college-age population who will go on to higher educ
ation—though the projections in the past have been notoriously faulty. On the basis of estimates by the U.S. Office of Education, the picture for 1977-1978 is shown in Table 3-18.
TABLE 3-18
Education in 1964 and 1967 Projected to 1977, Growth Rate, 1964-1977
SOURCE: Projections of Educational Statistics to 1977, HEW, 1969.
NOTES: The years given are academic years, thus, 1964 is 1964-1965, etc.
Degrees given include equivalents, thus are formally listed as Baccalaureates and the like, etc.
The dollar figures for 1964 are in 1963-1964 dollars, those for 1967 in 1967-1968 dollars, the projections in 1967-1968 dollars.
But how reliable are such projections? Our experience in the early 1970s, when the educational and research picture turned dim quite abruptly, provides some lessons in the hazards of forecasting. Most forecasters had simply projected the upward trends; yet they failed to take into account not only a set of political and sociological factors, but they had ignored crucial demographic indices as well. What was clear was that the period from 1955 to 1970 had been one of a rapid and forced expansion of scientists and engineers, of research Ph.D.s and of college teachers as the universities struggled to keep up with the demand. What is equally clear is that the decade of 1970-1980 will be one of retrenchment. What had happened?
In the period from 1955 to 1970, three elements had conjoined. One was the extraordinary expansion of U.S. support for science following the launching by the Russians of their Sputnik spacecraft, and the consequent fear that U.S. scientific efforts were lagging. In 1955, slightly over $7 billion was spent for research and development, or about 1.65 percent of GNP. By 1960, the figure had risen to $13 billion, or 2.7 percent of GNP and by 1965 to $17.7 billion or 2.87 percent of GNP. Outlays for space research and technology went from $400 million in fiscal 1961 to $6 billion in 1966. By the mid-1960s, nearly 400,000 scientists and engineers, or about 30 percent the national total, were supported by federal funds, and more than half (55 percent) of all research and development scientists and engineers were dependent on federal monies for their work.
The second element was the sudden demographic upsurge in the college-age generation. From 1950 to 1960, the number of young persons aged 14 to 24 was almost constant, rising only slightly from 26.6 to 27.1 million. But in the 1960 decade, reflecting the postwar baby boom, the cohort jumped 44 percent, going from 27.1 million in 1960 to 39 million in 1969.
Added to this—the third element—was not only an increase in the total population who might seek to go to college, but a simultaneous rise in the proportion itself of the age cohort who would seek to enter college, a proportion rising from 27 percent in 1955 to 40 percent in 1965. For these two reasons, the colleges and the universities in the 1960s were swamped with new students, and they acted to expand accordingly.
To help meet the growing demand for college teachers and for scientists and engineers, the federal government, for the first time, heavily underwrote the support of graduate education. By the mid-1960s, of approximately 250,000 full-time graduate students, three out of five were receiving support in the form of a fellowship or scholarship. In the natural sciences, four out of every five graduate students received some such support; in the non-scientific fields the ratio was approximately one in two. As a result of this heavy demand and support— and also because the selective service gave students postponement from the draft—the proportion of college graduates who entered graduate or professional schools jumped enormously. In the fifteen years from 1950 to 1965, the proportion went from one in six to one in two. In most of the Ivy League schools, about 80 percent of the graduating classes went on to some form of post-graduate work.
The result of all this was an extraordinary upsurge in the number of persons with a doctorate degree in the society. As Dael Wolfle and Charles V. Kidd have pointed out, from 1861, when Yale became the first American university to grant the Ph.D. degree, through 1970, American universities awarded 340,000 doctorates; half of those degrees were earned in the last nine years of the period.78
By 1970, however, the market picture had changed. Many of the elements which conjoined to create the boom explain the decline. One was the demographic levelling-off of the rate of expansion of the college-age population. Though the absolute number continued to increase, the bulge effect had worn off. Second was the sharp cuts in federal spending in the three sectors which directly affected the universities: cuts in graduate support programs, cuts in research monies, and cuts in the space and defense-related industries which, for the first time, created heavy unemployment (running from 5 to 10 percent in different science and engineering disciplines) in educated manpower and reducing sharply the demand for scientists and engineers. And third was the combined effects of the recession and inflation which, together with the cuts in federal spending, created large deficits in almost all university budgets.
One result of all this is a set of very different employment prospects for the American educated elite and, for the first time, a real threat of “overproduction.” More prolific than anyone had anticipated, graduate schools had been expanding degree output by nearly 14 percent a year rather than an anticipated 9 percent a year. As Allan M. Cartter has commented: “We have created a graduate education and research establishment in American universities that is about 30 to 50 percent larger than we shall effectively use in the 1970s and early 1980s.” In the science area alone, according to Cartter, academic, research, and industry needs (based on replacement and 5 percent growth) would require between 210,000 and 255,000 new doctorates to 1985; at present levels we would be producing between 325,000 and 375,000 Ph.D.s in the next fifteen years.79
But what of beyond the 1980s? The future needs for educated manpower depend largely on three elements: the demographic balances; the demands of new technology; and the proportion of the age cohort that will go to college.
If one follows the reasoning of Wallace R. Brode, a former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the surplus conditions of the 1970s and early 1980s will vanish by the mid-1980s, and thereafter the country will face a real shortage of scientific and engineering manpower. Brode’s reasoning is based on three factors: the continuation of the present technological growth rate, the peaking of the college-age population and then a down-turn in 1985, and a ceiling level in the proportion of scientists and engineers. Brode points out that since 1960, the annual number of college graduates in the natural sciences and engineering has been about 3.8 percent of the 2 2-year-olds. He considers this to be a natural ceiling set by the intellectual requirements of effective work in these fields. By computing the 3.8 percent against a projected trend of the number of students, he shows a surplus of bachelor’s level scientists and engineers from 1968 to 1986 followed by a shortage lasting from 1987 to 2005. “After 1983,” Brode writes, “the excess of scientists and engineers will taper off and by 1987 to the end of the century we are going to have a real shortage of scientists and engineers. If, by 1990, the scientist has maintained and improved his technical abilities, he can just about write his own ticket.”
Since the surplus of scientists and engineers in the next decade will probably be not more than 10 percent of the supply by 1983, Brode advocates a “holding pattern” to preserve the temporary excess of technologists. “We should establish,” he writes “through private, federal and state funding, technical programs in such areas as health, environmental improvement, pollution eradication, education, postdoctoral studies, updating courses, and basic research, in order to retain trained scientists and engineers and to expand their capability. In the period from 1970 to 1980, these workers will produce much of value and importance to the nation. In the decades after 1980, these scientists in the holding pattern would be prepared to fill important and much needed demands in industry, government and education.” 80
The overall picture, however, of the knowledge society depends on how far we go in completing the revolution in higher educati
on which began after World War II. In the 1920s, the United States took the first major step in the expansion of education by making secondary education compulsory for almost all by abolishing child labor, raising the school-age-leaving level, and increasing vastly the monies available for education. Today 93 percent of all youths in their age cohort enter high school, and 80 percent of that total complete their high school education.
As regards higher education, until 1945, college was largely for a small elite. From 1945 to 1970 we moved to mass higher education. (Today about 50 percent of the high school graduates enter college and 21 percent of all youths complete college.) The question is whether from 1970 to the year 2000 we will move to universal-access higher education.
We can turn to one set of detailed projections.
Between 1960 and 1980, the college-age population (18 to 21) will have increased by about 7 million; by the turn of the century it is likely to climb by another 7 million.81 The crucial question is what proportion of this group will go on to college. Allan M. Cartter and Robert Farrell have made some estimates on higher education to the last third of the century.82 Table 3-19 summarizes the historical relationship between the 18 to 2 1 age group and undergraduate enrollment. The pattern of college attendance has changed markedly in the first two-thirds of the century, for the attendance ratio has risen steadily from about .04 to .40, with only a minor break during war years. (In view of the age dispersion of college students noted in Note 81, these figures are expressed as attendance ratios rather than as percentages of the age group.) The lower half of the table projects five attendance ratios to the year 2000.
Applying various attendance rates to the population projections, Cartter and Farrell give a variety of estimates for future undergraduate enrollments (Table 3-20). These are baselines and can be employed as rough indicators, bur as Alice Rivlin has remarked: “It does not seem likely that anything useful can be accomplished by fitting more trend curves to the same basic data on enrollment ratios.... It is time to begin looking at college enrollment as a dependent variable.” 83
