Email
Print
ShareWASHINGTON: A new study attempts to debunk the myths that India or China beats the US in producing qualified engineers and that the American economy is facing a decline as it loses jobs to emerging economies.
The study has been conducted by North Carolina-based Duke University and authored by entrepreneur-turned-professor Vivek Wadhwa and his students.
The report, "Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate: Placing the US on a Level Playing Field with China and India", comes amid rising public opposition to increased outsourcing of progressively complex and high-tech jobs by blue-chip and other companies to countries like India.
Wadhwa claims this is a self-fulfilling prophecy that will drive students away from engineering if they feel their future is insecure.
The Duke University study takes one aspect of the debate, the production of qualified engineers, to examine if the US is falling behind.
"Our study has determined that one of the most cited statistics is simply wrong. The US isn't producing 70,000 engineers a year versus 350,000 from India and 600,000 from China.
We're actually graduating more engineers than India, and the Chinese numbers aren't quite what they seem. America is far ahead by almost any measure, and we're a long way from losing our edge," asserted Wadhwa.
Wadhwa, who recently became executive-in-residence in the Master of Engineering Management programme at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, says he could not answer one of the first questions his students asked him - what courses would lead to the best job prospects, and what jobs were "outsourcing-proof"?
Apart from a shortage of data from China and even India, Wadhwa said, his study found the definition of what an "engineer" is differed from country to country.
India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the leading body dealing with high-tech issues, provided detailed data for India.
The study shows that when US numbers were compared with NASSCOM data, the US 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 US 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.
"Most interestingly, when you compared just the number of engineers (excluding electrical), the US graduates 52,500 per year vs 17,000 from India," Wadhwa pointed out.
"In fact, I believe that India needs to graduate more engineers - it doesn't have enough four-year graduates for its own long-term needs based on how the economy is growing. "And our study shows that the threat to the US is overblown," Wadhwa contended.
Outsourcing 'to earn India $60bn'
Outsourcing services could directly employ 2.3m by 2010 India could earn $60bn a year by 2010 from information technology and outsourcing, an industry report says. The report was prepared by Nasscom, a lobby firm for Indian software and service companies, and international consulting firm McKinsey and Company.
It said business worth $110bn would be outsourced worldwide by 2010 and India is set to capture more than half of it. But the report said more investment was needed in developing skills and infrastructure to achieve the goals.
