According to Adjunct Professor Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University, India and China aren’t so far ahead of the US in churning out computer science and IT degrees. In 2004, they calculate that there were 137,437 engineering grads from 4-year schools in the US compared with 112,000 for India and 351,537 for China. Those numbers are considerably lower than the 352,000 from India and 600,000 from China. He claims the higher numbers include graduates of 2 and 3 year programs.

Wadhwa also concludes that the US has stricter standards than China for what they consider an engineer to be.

“There was no standardization of degrees,” Wadhwa said. “My conclusion is that China truly is graduating more engineers than the US in raw numbers, and that those numbers are very high,” Wadhwa said. “However, their focus is on quantity, not quality.”

I suppose that looks good until you look at the trends. According to Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat

The [2004 National Science Board] report found that the numbers of American eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds who receive science degrees has fallen to seventeenth in the world, whereas we ranked third three decades ago. It said that of the 2.8 million first university degrees (what we call bachelor’s degrees) in science and engineering granted worldwide in 2003, 1.2 million were earned by Asian students in Asian universities, 830,000 were granted in Europe and 400,000 in the United States. In engineering specifically, universities in Asian countries now produce eight times as many bachelor’s degrees as the United States.

Moreover, “the proportional emphasis on science and engineering is greater in other nations,” noted Shirley Ann Jackson. Science and engineering degrees now represent 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned in China, 33 percent in South Korea, and 41 percent in Taiwan. By contrast, the percentage of those taking a bachelor’s degree in science and engineering in the United States remains at roughly 31 percent. Factoring out science degrees, the number of Americans who graduate with just engineering degrees is 5 percent, as compared to 25 percent in Russia and 46 percent in China, according to a 2004 report by Trilogy Publications, which represents the national U.S. engineering professional activities.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to why companies are outsourcing jobs to China and India. Friedman also cites lower cost, higher productivity and higher ambition as factors. He also points out that there are a lot of people in China. “Remember, in China when you are one in a million - there are 1,300 other people just like you.”