Future Supply of Science and Mathematics Students
The technological advances of this country during the Twentieth Century have been made possible by a steadily increasing number of men and women engaged in engineering, the sciences, and mathematics. Without a substantial number of trained and competent workers in these fields we could not have brought the antibiotics, television, radar, the jet engine, and countless other products and processes to their high state of development. While the supply of scientists and engineers has made possible these products of research and development, those products have, in turn, created increasing demands for more scientists, more engineers, more mathematicians, and more technicians. We might go even further in exploring the relationships between technological progress on the one hand and the supply of and demand for scientists on the other. If we had adequate methods of measuring the variables involved, I suspect that we would find some kind of direct relationship between the rate at which we are experiencing technological change and the size of the resulting demand for scientists and technologists.