The National Science Foundation has issued its latest report on graduate-student enrollment in science & engineering fields, taking a decade of data up through 2010. There are now about 560,000 graduate students enrolled in S&E fields at any one time, nationwide. Among these are the people who do most of the actual lab work on federally and industrially sponsored research conducted at our nation’s universities and colleges. They are the elite of the STEM workforce: those who aren’t bound for academic and educational careers may start companies or staff big corporate R&D centers.

As usual, the NSF statisticians have done an excellent job calling out the major trends. Over the decade, one sees faster overall enrollment growth in engineering fields than in science; extremely rapid growth in biomedical engineering; and above-average growth for both women and almost all non-white minorities. Though we’re cautioned not to make too much of the year-over-years, in the 2009/2010 comparison I think it’s possible to to see the effects of priorities in the federal research budget favoring physical sciences, earth sciences, and the range of engineering disciplines pertinent to the renewable-energy and advanced-manufacturing sectors. All that’s good news.

One other observation the report makes is that graduate enrollment grew at the same rate for U.S. citizens and permanent residents as for temporary visa holders. This is bad news: after a decade of growth in graduate enrollments, some 30% of all graduate students are still here on visas that virtually guarantee their return home when they graduate. Either that, or they can place themselves at the tender mercies of an employer willing to offer a “sponsored” visa like the H-1B, a boon that can be withheld at will and thus a virtual guarantee of wage suppression.

Our disgraceful failure to offer full-fledged permanent residency to foreign students who have earned graduate degrees here not only insults the foreign born and strengthens our potential economic rivals, but it really presents American-born students with a very unhelpful object lesson: that their reward for graduate study in the STEM disciplines is to see many of the available jobs filled at preference by the exploited, often as a way-station to their complete offshoring. If we want students to study the STEM disciplines through graduate school and put those skills to work here rather than in some other nation, let’s reward all who do so with the loyalty of a grateful society.

Though I maintain a library of university economic-impact studies, I’m on the record as being quite skeptical of them, especially those that are purely quantitative. I was unsurprised when The New York Times noted the obvious weaknesses in the economic-impact study recently commissioned by Apple, which tried to counter the reality that nearly all Apple’s manufacturing takes place overseas with soothing statistics on jobs “supported” in app development, retail, and even shipping. The Times quotes MIT economist David Autor as saying:

“[the] entire business of claiming ‘direct and indirect’ job creation is disreputable” because most of the workers Apple is taking credit for would have been employed elsewhere in the company’s absence

Indeed. Pretty much the same weakness infects the “counterfactual” assumptions built into most university studies, according a nice economics working paper linked in my earlier blog post on the latter topic. In the end, although impact studies seem to satisfy some institutional need for quantification, they are rarely persuasive either to the general public or politicians, who value the economic contribution of any enterprise based its observable efforts to make a difference.

(With this post I inaugurate a series of occasional items tagged “quick takes,” in which I’ll link to and offer short reaction to events or documents that touch on my areas of interest, though possibly not directly enough to permit full commentary at an acceptable level of quality.)

There’s more common sense about K12 math instruction in this fascinating dialogue posted at Education Next than in the math sections of the recent report on STEM education by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The PCAST report correctly identifies poor math preparation as a key barrier to retaining college students in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) disciplines, but then utterly fails to reference or take a position on any of the ongoing debate over math standards. It simply blandly recommends a “national experiment” in effective math instruction. On the other hand, Education Next — apparently some kind of collaboration between Stanford and the Harvard Kennedy School — appears to be a website worth watching, and I will.