TRENDS IN THE GEOSCIENCES - EDUCATION, EMPLOYMENT AND CAREERS

In 2002 the geosciences are at a critical crossroads. Enrollments in the geoscience departments across the country have steadily declined over the past five years, reaching levels comparable to the late 1960s. University enrollments and career opportunities in the geosciences have been highly cyclic over the past twenty years, driven largely by the employment demands of the petroleum, environmental, and mining industries. Economic conditions, inevitable demographic changes, and shifts in global employment-sector patterns strongly affect geoscience student enrollment levels and drive the cyclicity of demand. Today, seemingly contradictory trends are operating simultaneously, generating a complex human-resource supply-demand picture for the geosciences. With the aging of the geoscience workforce, impending industry retirement waves, a demonstrated need for K-12 Earth science educators, and a continued and expanding demand for the development of Earth’s resources, we expect that the need for geoscientists will increase over the next decade. However, mergers combined with downturns in the petroleum and mining industries and budget cuts at the federal level have resulted in major displacements of geoscientists in the workforce over the past five years. Thus demand in the geosciences is subject to a variety of positive and negative forces that we believe must be better understood, and used as the rationale basis for recruitment and advising of students in University geoscience programs.