MANPOWER RESOURCES*

[Reprinted from American Scientist, vol. 44, No. 2, April 1956]

SOME ELEMENTS OF A GRAND STRATEGY FOR AUGMENTING OUR SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING MANPOWER RESOURCES

By James R. Killian, Jr., president, Massachusetts Institute of Technology There is a story about a cello player who sawed away continuously on a single note. His wife remarked to him that other cello players seemed to move their fingers up and down the strings, producing less monotonous sounds.

"Oh!" replied the cellist, "they are looking for the note. I've found it!" Recently I have been asking myself whether, along with many others, I have the note or whether I have not restricted myself to too few notes in discussing our current manpower requirements in science and engineering. I have an uneasy feeling that we may have become bemused by numbers and by over-simplified quantitative measures and remedies in evaluating our manpower needs in the broad field of technology-defining technology as the combination of science, engineering, and production. That we have an acute shortage of available, effectively used competence in many fields of technology there can be no reasonable doubt. Neither can there be a reasonable doubt any longer that this scarcity is a clear and present danger to the nation and to the entire free world. My theme does not involve challenging this scarcity or its danger to the nation. It does emphasize the need for a better understanding of the nature of the shortage and of the paramount importance of qualitative factors in any plan for meeting our manpower needs. I wish particularly to examine ways in which our educational system must respond to our manpower needs and how current attitudes and values with respect to science may affect the supply of scientists.

If we are to promote action on a grand scale for augmenting our scientific resources, we need to look at every factor that might help. Consequently I wish to suggest some of the elements of a grand strategy which must be stressed along with increasing the quality of our science teaching and countering Russia's remarkable technological buildup and the grim threat it holds for us.

With these guidelines before us, let us now look at the nature of the present dearth of scientists and engineers in the face of a greatly increased demand. It is not simply a shortage of men. First and basically, it is a shortage of intellectual talent adequately educated and in the right place. Second, it is more a shortage of specific talents and skills adaptable to specific areas than a general shortage of numbers.

The shortage of high talent is aggravated by the fact that too many young people of exceptional intellectual ability drop out of our educational system before they have achieved an education which fully exploits their abilities. The loss between high school and college graduation has been repeatedly reported. Of the ablest 50 percent of high-school graduates only about a third show up on the list of college degree recipients. Of the top 2 percent of our high-school graduates only about two-thirds now graduate from college. From these facts we draw two morals. The first is that too many of our ablest youth fail to get the kind of education their abilities deserve. The second is that without dropping standards we can achieve only a limited increase in our college population by stepping up the percentage of high-school graduates who go to college. Both these conclusions stress the importance of motivating and using more of our exceptional talent and directing our attention to its conservation and cultivation.

*Information assembled by the committee staff related to matters under discussion in the hearings on Science and Education for National Defense.

1 Sigma Xi address, A. A. A. S. meeting, Atlanta, Ga., December 27, 1955.

In a recent letter prepared for the subcommittee on school goals of the Committee for the White House Conference on Education, Mr. Dael Wolfle has made the following observations about the relation of the scientist shortage to our resources of talent:

"We must plan our educational programs to encourage more of the bright youngsters to prepare for scientific and technical careers. It is debatable, however, as to whether the most effective method of securing that end is to concentrate on young people who may become scientists or to concentrate on those of high ability. A scholarship for a student to study science may help. but not if his high-school experience has been so discouraging as to turn him away from higher education in any form. Improved high-school instruction in science may help, but not if the youngster grew up in an environment that puts high value on getting out of school as soon as possible.

"The loss [between high school and college] could be reduced by provision of a larger number of college scholarships. It could be still further reduced by so changing the high-school curriculum as to provide a more stimulating and challenging four years of learning and experience for the brightest high-school students. It could be still further reduced by those, necessarily slow, social and cultural changes that would place greater emphasis upon the importance of education, as distinct from diplomas, and upon the importance of recognizing high ability and giving it full opportunity for development wherever it may be found.

"Since the effectiveness of different methods is debatable, but the importance of scientific manpower perfectly obvious, my own preference would be to devote our educational, scholarship, guidance, and encouragement efforts to boys and girls of high ability, whatever their fields of special interest, to plan educational programs for as much flexibility as possible by keeping alternative paths open, to keep careful watch over the number of students preparing for careers in science, and only to abandon the broader and, I believe, more socially desirable approach in favor of special treatment for prospective scientists if it appears that we are not likely to get enough scientists out of our broader attack upon the general problem of recognizing, encouraging, and developing high ability." I find myself in agreement with Mr. Wolfle's analysis and his preferred policy. For the long pull I think the nation would be better served by augmenting the total pool of exceptional talent so that all of our professions benefit rather than by giving exclusive attention to getting more talent into science and engineering. even though the need for manpower in these fields is at the present time the most urgent. If we attempt to build up science and engineering through methods which apparently deprive other professions of a fair share of the talent pie, we may generate a host of undesirable reactions and side effects inimical to the welfare of science in the long run. We might also attract into science too many whose talents and predilections were more compatible with other kinds of careers and who would therefore become indifferent scientists and engineers. One of the reasons we are in trouble now is that some secondary teachers and administrators have placed a low value on science and shown an inadequate understanding of its intellectual requirements and its importance to our society. As we seek to give science its proper place and emphasis in the secondary school I hope that we do not overshoot and place a low value on other fields and thus bring about their neglect.

Whether there is agreement among scientists with the line of action proffered by Wolfle, I think there will be agreement that any grand strategy for augmenting our scientific manpower must be related to a concerted effort to identify, encourage, and more fully educate the top talent among our youth.

In reviewing the clinical evidence on the nature of the manpower shortage. let us next take a reading on the qualitative aspects of the current excess of demand over supply, using as our example the field of engineering. One has only to talk with the placement officers of our scientific and technological institutions to get revealing evidence of the increasingly selective demand for engineers. Employers are not looking merely for bodies with degrees; they are looking with a critical eye for very special qualifications-for a sound education in fundamentals, for analytical power, for a grasp of the new and advanced fields of technology. They are looking less for specialized competence at the baccalaureate level and more for men who have the versatility to follow successfully any one of several specialties. They are looking more and more for men and women with graduate degrees.

These special placement demands indicate a great shortage of young engineers with a mastery of engineering science and thus a competence to handle new,

advancing technologies, such as data processing, internal and external aerodynamics, energy conversion, communications, servo-mechanisms, molecular engineering and solid state physics for the design of materials, and similar functional components of technology.

Thus industry and government are pressing the colleges for engineers of more advanced education and analytical powers. They are looking for men with a fundamental, integrated education in science, engineering, and the humanities rather than for men specialized in some field of technology at the expense of fundamentals. Employers want more scientists and engineers, but they don't think they are meeting their needs by employing narrowly educated ones. In this new pattern of demand lies the pattern for a modernized engineering education as I intend later to emphasize.

Similarly in the basic sciences our most pressing needs are for those scientists who have the imagination and trained creative power to make the discoveries and generate the new concepts which advance science. Quite properly we hear much about the need for basic research and the funds to support it. These needs indeed are great, but greater still is the need for more scientists who have the trained talent, the motivation, and the conceptualizing power to make basic research really basic.

In stressing the need for exceptional talent, I do not minimize the critical shortage of the rank and file of good competent scientists and engineers. Flag officers are not enough to provide a strong scientific attack force, but the really acute shortage is now in the flag-officer group.

These qualitative characteristics of the present shortage clearly affect the design of any comprehensive strategy for relieving the present dearth.

In the secondary schools the first order of business is to shore up the sagging emphasis on science and to begin filling in the decimated ranks of science teachers and to do this, not with culls from other fields, but with teachers possessing a grasp of science and the perception to identify and stimulate youngsters with the bent and capacity for science. The dean of one of our schools of education recently came to me with the evidence that the secondary school system was recruiting negligible numbers of top science majors from the colleges, especially our institutes of technology. In competition with other fields, it could not offer them a sufficiently attractive career. He also noted the apparent reluctance of our science departments and schools to encourage bright young graduates to go into secondary school science teaching, a situation that was also noted in the first report of the Science Teaching Improvement Program of which the American Association for the Advancement of Science is one of the sponsors. He expressed pessimism about sustained improvement in science teaching unless we could induce more really first-rate young scientist bachelors to elect secondary school teaching as a career. It is fine to upgrade existing science teachers and to supplement them with part-time personnel, but these are only partial solutions.

The influence of the secondary school vocational counsellor is growing steadily, and it is of obvious importance that these counsellors understand the scientific manpower needs of the country. It is particularly important that these counsellors not harbor misapprehensions about scientific and engineering careers, particularly because so many of them have had no opportunity to gain any insight into science. There is the need which Mr. Wolfle has stressed for earlier identification of scientific talent, such identification coming as early as the seventh grade. There is the need for more rigor, more emphasis on excellence in the secondary school. As President DuBridge has said, we need "to make thinking popular." I suspect that much of the flight from science at the secondary school level has resulted from the fear of science as a difficult subject of study. In the pejorative argot of the high-school youngster, only a "brain goes for science" and sometimes a brain is considered a "queer." With such attitudes in the ascendancy, science is avoided in favor of subjects which are less demanding, more descriptive, more easily passed, more easily taught.

Blame for this aversion to rigorous thinking rests with parents even more than it does with the schools. So far we have managed to get along in the United States by displaying an attitude of condescension toward hard intellectual labor in our schools. There has been avoidance, if not evasion, of the intellectual tax which must be paid if our intellectual budget is to be balanced. Any strategy for strengthening manpower resources must give attention to this fatty degeneration (if I may change the metaphor) in our education. At a time when we are forced to match wits on every front with an alert enemy of growing prowess, America's survival requires that the American people attach

a higher value to the hard labor of rigorous thought. Certainly progress in science and technology requires this kind of intellectual work-work which can be invigorating and absorbing even though hard and demanding.

Other aspects of high-school education require attention as we seek to augment our manpower resources. The high-school program should be flexible, so that an early election of program does not commit a boy or girl irrevocably to some prematurely selected career or educational program. Too often gifted young people without all the facts before them elect a program which makes it difficult for them to go to college, if later their sights are raised or their circumstances change. The vocational high school is vitally important in our educational scheme and serves many young people admirably but it never should be so managed or organized that youngsters of college caliber who elect the vocational program find themselves too late unprepared in motivation or training for college. This need for flexibility has a direct bearing on the conservation of exceptional talent for higher education. We must avoid creating dead-end kids who become caught in educational cul-de-sacs when they have the ability to travel farther up the avenue of education.

In making these observations about secondary school education, I must make clear my conviction that public schools have a much more comprehensive job to do than preparing young people for college. I am surprised at the number of college people, particularly college professors teaching freshmen, who think that the exclusive mission of the high school is to prepare youngsters for college preferably their college. I am equally surprised by others who apparently ignore the fact that one of the extremely important functions of schools is to prepare younsters for college. Because of my natural interest in the education of scientists and engineers, I find that I must keep reminding myself that although the education of our future scientists and engineers has been neglected with effects endangering the Nation, the education of other kinds of people is also important. We should not neglect any one group of youngsters in order to strengthen another.

Secondary schools, it must also be remembered, play a major part in maintaining our fluid, classless society. Criticism of the high schools for not confining their programs to teaching the intellectual skills is neither fair nor in the interest of the nation. I hope that methods for strengthening science teaching and increasing the numbers of scientists will not result in unfortunate distortion of this broader function of the public school program.

Our schools should be designed to help all children, and the needs of children of different abilities, different backgrounds, and different aspirations. But we do need to come to a better understanding of the importance of priorities and the necessity of discriminating choices so that we can temper our prodigality of aims by sobering considerations of quality, social and intellectual needs, and achievable goals.

At this point in the evolution of our schools the highest priorities should be given to better provision for our intellectually gifted young people, greater stress on the more rigorous teaching of intellectual skills, and on higher standards of excellence for both teachers and pupils.

I feel that success in promoting these broader objectives for the schools will carry with it improvements in the motivation and teaching of future scientists. I am very skeptical of such expedients as accelerated programs for those interested in science or any efforts to make a sharp vocational distinction between those interested in science and those who are not. It does seem desirable to provide programs in which the intellectually gifted youngster, regardless of his ultimate specialization, can go farther and deeper. Experimental programs are showing that such programs can make it practical to give advanced standing in college and thus to cover more ground during the college period.

At the college level there are many improvements available to us for strengthening our scientific and engineering education. The liberal arts colleges are of course the principal sources of candidates for our graduate schools of science. The Wesleyan study and others have shown how remarkable has been the suc cess of a number of small liberal arts colleges in preparing men and women to become distinguished specialists in science. This stresses the importance of still further strengthening the teaching of science in this type of institution and thus attracting more college students to major in science and proceed on to graduate school. Increasing the number of science majors in the liberal arts college is one of the quickest ways available to us to increase the number of scientists. It will require an attitude in these institutions that does not underrate science-an attitude, as I shall emphasize later, that sees an understand