Who Will Build the 21st Century? Addressing Critical Demographic Gaps in the Geosciences

摘要

The geoscience workforce in the United States may be facing a critical shortage of trained personnel (Gonzalez and Keane, 2011; NRC, 2013; Mosher et al., 2014; Wilson, 2014a). The National Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 16% increase in geoscience jobs by 2022. If, as projected, more than half of the present geoscience workforce retires by that time (Wilson, 2014a, 2014b), up to 185,000 new geoscientists will be needed. Graduation rates in U.S. geoscience programs (Wilson, 2014a) are slowly increasing but still lack the capacity to produce such numbers by 2022 (Fig. 1A). The result is a projected shortfall of 135,000 trained geoscientists within the next decade (Wilson, 2014a, 2014b). To meet these growing challenges to our ability to research, assess, and utilize our natural resources in an environmentally responsible manner, we must increase the number of geoscience students.