Multiple Pathways to Science and Engineering Employment: Characteristics of the U.S. S&E Workforce

Since the post-World War II era, the U.S. has experienced a period of rapid expansion in its higher education system as well as in the size of its workforce. During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. federal government put in place many programs that encouraged this growth. At the same time, administrative record-keeping was also put in place to manage the programs. Eventually, these administrative uses expanded to meet policy needs. This lead to the development of a series of institutional and demographic surveys on degree attainment in science and engineering (S&E), graduate enrollment in S&E, and on the S&E workforce. The combination of these data sources provides a rich and detailed picture of the movement of individuals through the U.S. educational system and into the workforce. In this paper, the major demographic, educational and employment characteristics of the U.S. science and engineering talent pool will be described. Institutional data will be used to focus on postsecondary enrollments and degree production in S&E, to lay the groundwork for the entry into the S&E pipeline. This will be followed by a broad description of the characteristics and trends of the S&E workforce. Standard educational or labor force characteristics will be used to describe the pipeline. Additionally, the very rich U.S. workforce data will be used to show the many pathways that S&E and non-S&E trained individuals take to enter and then move into the broader U.S. labor force.The examination of this data shows that there are multiple and parallel pathways that individuals go through to enter into their careers, and it is not possible to identify one, or even a small number of pathways, that can be seen as generalizable to a large population. Rather, what can be seen is that combinations of degrees (as a proxy for skills), lead to a very large variety of occupational outcomes, even in some areas that are not, on the surface, directly related to science and engineering.