Publication

This report summarizes the second-year progress in a two-year study of policy innovations to enhance the STEM talent pipeline, from K-12 through college into STEM workforce.

The STEM talent pool and pipeline is critical to US national security, both militarily and economically. The Department of Defense is concerned with formulating and executing policies that will enhance the flow of talent through this pipeline, with a specific focus on selected and strategic technology domains. This report addresses two of five initiatives focused on developing such policies.

Let’s put this question in perspective. Last year’s research (Verma et al., 2022) identified the following elements of the STEM talent pipeline:

1. 16% of HS grads are STEM ready.
2. 20% of HS grads choose STEM majors.
3. 50% of STEM students graduate non-STEM.
4. 60% of STEM grads take non-STEM jobs.
5. 90% of STEM grads use STEM skills in jobs.

Thus, 3.2% (.16 x .50 x .40) of HS graduates enter the STEM workforce. Our best leverage for improving this is the first and third elements, which constituted task 4 and task 5 of a two-year project.

This project involved five tasks pursued across the two-year plan. These tasks, listed below, are sufficiently interconnected to cause progress during the first year to include accomplishments related to the two tasks associated with the second year. Similarly, tasks associated with the second year heavily relied on results and research achieved during the first year. Hence, in this introduction we list all five tasks. The rest of the report will focus on the tasks of the second year, that are tasks 4 and 5.

• Year 1 Tasks:

1. Development of an economic model of the higher education ecosystem to understand financial drivers of the overall university system and drivers within the research environment.
2. Talent identification and recruitment to protect and promote the domestic and international STEM workforce.
3. Identification of selected universities to support their achieving preeminence in strategic areas.

• Year 2 Tasks:

4. Engaging and nurturing promising high school students towards STEM, and perhaps national security application domains.

5. Modeling policy instruments to better understand short - and long term impacts, both positive and negative on the US STEM Talent Pipeline.