After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.

"From short sleeve to short sleeve - 3 generations".

During the past 2 decades, part of an era that has been described as science and engineering’s greatest period of accomplishment, the numbers of engineers, mathematicians, physical scientists, and geoscientists graduating with bachelor’s degrees in the United States have declined by 18%. The proportion of university students achieving bachelor’s degrees in these fields has declined by almost 40% during that time.

Almost twice as many bachelor’s degrees were awarded in physics the year before Sputnik, deemed a time of dangerous educational neglect, as last year.

The number of engineering doctorates awarded by US universities to US citizens dropped by 23% in the past decade.

In 2002, Asian countries as a whole awarded 636,000 first engineering degrees, European countries awarded 370,000, and North America awarded 122,000.

The US share of the global output of doctorates in science and engineering declined from 52% in 1986 to 22% in 2003.

The United States ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering, a fall from third place three decades ago. It ranks 26th in the proportion receiving undergraduate degrees in mathematics.

The share of doctoral degrees awarded by US universities in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics to US citizens dropped from 65% in 1987 to 53% in 2005 (although the composition of this group was not uniform—for example, 84% of the degrees in psychology go to US citizens).

‏¹ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-fa...