Graduates in any discipline are costly to produce. It is better that these expensive skills are not lost to the State

SCIENCE:SUPPLY AND DEMAND is a curious thing. It drives the free market economy but also manages to interfere in the minute personal details of our lives. It plays around – usually for the worse – with the price of petrol or of broccoli, but also makes the value of gold, pork bellies and concentrated orange juice rise and fall like the drone of a Scotsman's bagpipes.

Students completing the Leaving Certificate this June will soon learn all about the nasty side of supply and demand. Points for many subjects are expected to rise across the board given the free-market pressures of an extra 4,500 doing the leaving and expected to seek places at third level.

The job market also dances to the vagaries of supply and demand. We faced a shortage of occupational therapists a few years back. Yet when many rushed to take OT degrees in response, the market contracted and the degree holders had to take their skills abroad. The same thing has happened repeatedly on the computer jobs market.

We may be in for a similar rough ride on the science side. We are in the midst of doubling our third-level PhD output in order to have highly capable scientists to feed into hoped-for foreign direct investment by multinational high-tech industries. But what if they don’t show up? What if they go to Singapore or South Korea instead?

We saw the hateful impact of supply and demand on the science jobs front in the 1980s when often nearly all students in graduating classes in the sciences were forced to emigrate. They decamped to the US, UK and Australia in order to use their highly valuable skills, got used to nice weather, nice pay and secure employment and decided to stay away for good.

Unfortunately, the supply/demand balance beam doesn’t register “fairness”, it only points to which of the two is in the ascendant.

People with Masters and PhDs in the sciences, engineering and maths are extremely valuable to the State as the Government pursues its current “smart economy” agenda. It is difficult to find fault with that agenda, the goal being to push our economy higher up the value chain. Success has the potential to produce more highly technical, high-value jobs for our people, creating wealth and demand for services that deliver more jobs. Just like in the Celtic Tiger days.

But what if we can’t absorb – even on a temporary basis – the higher throughput of postgraduates? And have we reached that situation right now, even as we build our knowledge economy?

I have no statistics to hand that show this is so, but there are those phone calls. One or two a month. Sometimes parents, sometimes postgraduates, wondering why they bothered to get a science degree because there are no jobs about and immigration is the only recourse.

The still substantial Government spend on scientific research under the smart economy agenda does offer opportunities, with post docs getting picked up and plugged into ongoing research. These same research fellows are then able to move across to industry if the fancy takes them and the jobs present themselves.

But there are those disquieting phone calls. Not everyone seems to be benefiting from the science spend.

There seems limited room for optimism when looking at the very useful “First Destinations Report” compiled each year by the Higher Education Authority. This looks at what graduates from all faculties do next, with questions on jobs, study and income asked nine months after completion of a degree.

The latest, What Do Graduates Do? The class of 2007, released in October 2009, notes in its introduction that in general the class of 2007 “may have experienced some difficulty in obtaining employment in comparison to the graduates of 2006”. It continues however, “we would expect the effect of the current economic downturn to be much more discernible in the data presented in next year’s report”.

Graduates in any discipline are expensive to produce. They consume a lot of high-cost education before winning their degrees and it is generally better that these expensive skills are not lost to the State.

This is particularly true of science graduates, the ones most closely linked to the ambitions behind the smart economy. The smart economy can only evolve provided we have the engineers and physicists and chemists and biologists to do research and work in high-tech companies and come up with discoveries that can be turned into jobs and wealth.

Government policy at every turn must be aimed at keeping these valuable people here if possible. Some will leave and that is a good thing provided that after a few years they might see fit to return home with even more skills acquired abroad.