Economics Professors David Blau and Bruce Weinberg are authors of a new study finding that the science and engineering workforce in the U.S. has aged rapidly in recent years relative to the workforce as a whole and that current trends imply a further substantial increase in the age of the scientific workforce in coming years.

Blau and Weinberg looked at data from the National Science Foundation's Survey of Doctorate Recipients, tracking about 73,000 scientists aged 76 or younger. Roughly 40 percent were academic scientists, from tenured professors to staff researchers. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also relied on some U.S. census data.

“The aging of the scientific workforce is not over — not by a longshot,” said Blau. 

The authors attribute much of what they observed to late-career baby boomers, who are pushing the workforce at large to grow older. But scientists are getting older even faster than their educated peers in other fields, in large part due to the 1994 decision to eliminate mandatory retirement at age 70 for universities, the study suggests. And if factors including the age at which scientists retire and the PhD completion rate remain the same, the research predicts that this overall aging trend will continue for decades to come.

“We’re on our way to even older status quo,” said Weinberg.

Some researchers have raised concerns that older scientists may not be as creative or productive as those at the beginning of their careers, and might be keeping younger scientists out of the field. But those possibilities haven’t been proven, said Weinberg (see Weinberg's 2011 study of Nobel Laureates from 1901 to 2008 and the age at which they did their prize-winning work).

“We don’t have the answers yet, but we are continuing to investigate the implications of our aging scientific workforce,” Weinberg said.  

Blau and Weinberg’s study has received extensive media coverage in in Science, Inside Higher Ed, The Columbus Dispatch and Columbus Monthly.