3. The science and engineering workforce
Source: OECD, based on OECD (2017), Education at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators and OECD (2007), Education at a Glance 2007: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris. StatLink contains more data. See chapter notes.
India has almost 600 000 tertiary ICT graduates, about five times as many as the United States.
Tertiary education has expanded worldwide to support the supply of highly educated individuals and meet rising demand for cognitive skills. Policy makers are particularly interested in the supply of scientists, engineers and ICT experts because of their direct involvement in technical change and the ongoing digital transformation. In 2015, 23% of students graduating at tertiary level within the OECD did so with a degree in the natural sciences, engineering, and information and communication technologies (NSE & ICTs). In spite of perceived shortages in this area, this share has remained fairly constant over the past decade across the OECD. However, women account for only 31% of all NSE & ICT graduates in 2015, with shares ranging from 18% in Chile to 44% in Poland. India and Indonesia had the largest shares of ICT graduates in their tertiary graduate population. India contributed the largest number of ICT graduates at nearly 585 000 and is also the country closest to gender parity in this field.
Research skills also have high policy relevance and their acquisition through doctorate programmes is often subsidised by governments. There are marked differences among countries with respect to the share of the population with doctorate degrees. Switzerland has the greatest share of doctorates among the working-age population, due in part to a relatively large proportion of foreign doctoral graduates. In 2016, in more than one-third of countries for which data are available, doctoral holders represented over 1% of the working age population, a rate that has been increasing progressively over time. The share of female doctorate holders was 40% on average.
Definitions
The natural sciences, engineering and ICT fields correspond to the following fields in the ISCED-2013 classification: 05 Natural sciences, mathematics and statistics; 06 Information and Communication Technologies; and 07 Engineering, manufacturing and construction.
Graduates at the tertiary level are individuals that have obtained a degree at ISCED-2011 Levels 5 to 8. The doctorate level corresponds to individuals who have obtained a degree at ISCED-2011 Level 8, namely advanced research qualifications, usually concluding with the submission and defence of a substantive dissertation of publishable quality based on original research.
Source: OECD calculations based on OECD Education Database, September 2017. StatLink contains more data. See chapter notes.
Source: OECD calculations based on OECD data collection on Careers of Doctorate Holders 2017, http://oe.cd/cdh, OECD (2017), Education at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators and OECD (2009), Education at a Glance 2009: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris. StatLink contains more data. See chapter notes.
Indicators on graduates by field of education are computed on the basis of annual data jointly collected by UNESCO-UIS/OECD/Eurostat. This data collection process aims to provide internationally comparable information on key aspects of education systems in more than 60 countries worldwide (http://www.oecd.org/education/database.htm). The implementation in this data collection of the 2011 revision of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED-11) and the ISCED 2013 Fields classification impacts the comparability with data obtained in earlier collections. This presents a minor problem at the chosen level of aggregation, for which there is a clearer equivalence.
Obtaining statistically representative data on the role of doctorate holders in the population is challenging due to the relatively small size of this population. There is an ongoing horizontal effort at OECD to promote the regular and systematic reporting by countries of key features of this fast-growing and internationally mobile group with unique research competences that can be valuable beyond academia (http://oe.cd/cdh).