With apologies to surrealist artist and world-class eccentric Salvador Dali, from whom the headline was borrowed, a persistent institutional memory would remind us that some problems seem more like permanent conditions rather than things that can be fixed.

A case in point is the shortage of petroleum industry technical talent, which a casual observer might reasonably assume is a brand new crisis. Not quite. Consider the following commentary in a respected industry trade journal:

“Enrollments in engineering colleges have been falling off, largely due to a widely and erroneously held belief that engineers were in oversupply. In the present emergency there is fear of drafting engineers in positions for which their engineering training and experience are not mandatory. Already there is evidence of a critical shortage of engineers and other technically trained personnel in many branches of the industry. It is estimated that in normal peace time 20,000 graduates in engineering are required by industry annually. In each of the last two years 50,000 engineers were graduated from colleges throughout the country and all were absorbed by industry. This large number included engineers whose engineering education was delayed or interrupted by the war. Enrollments of engineering students are now showing a startling decline. Under present draft regulations there is likely to be a further drastic drop in enrollments. A minimum of at least 30,000 new graduate engineers annually are needed in industry for the emergency. To obtain this number requires an annual freshman enrollment of 60,000, or more than twice the number of engineering students entering this year. The total enrollment of all students in the colleges of the nation [last year] was 6.6 percent less than [the year before] but engineering enrollments for the same year were 20 percent less.”

The years were disguised to make it harder to guess when this was written, but other clues may get you close. It appeared in the February, 1951 issue of The Petroleum Engineer, which, as some of you may know, is this magazine’s predecessor.

The author obtained the data from a study done by the Manpower Committee of the American Society for Engineering Education (judging by its name, this organization seems remarkably well suited to such an effort). Obviously the trend of declining enrollment did not continue at the same rate, or else engineers would be in extremely short supply by now.
At the time, the US military, with conscription in effect, was a large consumer of engineering manpower. This not the case today, of course, but removing that factor alone would not have reversed the decline. Some thing or things happened to either slow the decline or stabilize the numbers, because we seem to be muddling through, as nearby ads for the latest tech amply attest. Remember, this shrill warning of “…impending scarcity of engineering and technical talent…” was issued 56 years ago.

But whether or not there’s a shortage of engineers is another fish to fry. The point here is some industry problems seem eternal. Browsing old issues of The Petroleum Engineer is an education in their, er, persistence. Young idealists who think problems can be eliminated should learn from older and wiser colleagues who know many problems can only be managed. They never go away.

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