Mass wasting is more like it.
NOLADishu points me to a presentation given by Shell’s Donal Rajasingam at this year’s Tulane Engineering Fair. Within a pretty good collection of statistics on increasing energy demands and aging infrastructure, the above set of graphs on energy talent supply stands out. We don’t have enough people now, so who’s going to work the problem later?
The graph on the bottom left is one I consider even more troubling. What it shows you is that with the growing global demand for PE graduates, the gap between the number of all graduates and high-quality ones is increasing. I believe the same goes for the geosciences, considering the geology and geophysics MS factories I observe in the south. We cannot afford to take just anyone with a geo or engineering degree and, in most cases, we don’t. But, what will we do in the upcoming pinch?
What’s the old saying? “We offer three kinds of service: Good, Cheap, Fast. You get to pick two.” I think we’ll be lucky to get one.
The slide was taken from here:
http://www.sbc.slb.com/About_SBC/Press_Releases/SBC_2010_SBC_Oil_Gas_HR_Benchmark_Released_29_Mar_2011.aspx
That led to two papers that were published in SPE’s journal:
http://www.spe.org/jpt/print/archives/2011/06/13TalentTech.pdf
http://www.spe.org/jpt/print/archives/2010/02/7GuestEditorial.pdf
And since you’re interested in the “high-quality” programs, I dug around their footnotes and found they were talking about 77 universities rated by SLB’s recruiters in their top 2 categories. They never explicitly list them, but I gather it’s some universities from Western Europe, a few from the rest of the globe, with the overwhelming majority being US. I’m guessing the usual suspect “elite” universities (MIT, CalTech, Princeton, etc.), plus the “public Ivy’s” (Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc.), the California schools, and some remainder like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Universities {yay Tulane!}.
And, since I love history, here’s a little background about Tulane’s Petroleum Engineering program. They had a pretty highly regarded one back in the day. They had Dr. Maurice Stewart, who wrote several industry texts that are so highly regarded, they’re still in use today. The oil bust happens, enrollment plummets like a stone. They axed the undergraduate program ~1993, but hung onto the graduate program for some time. I don’t think it was until ~2003 that they finally killed the graduate program. They had AWFUL timing on killing the program…
The market will correct… Eventually… And not necessarily painlessly or safely.