<b>A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE DIFFERENTIALS IN </b><b>ENGINEERING GRADUATION NUMBERS IN INDIA AND THE US WITH THE IMPLICATIONS THEREOF</b>

<p dir="ltr">This work examined changes in engineering undergraduate education in India and the United States of America from 2003 to 2022, specifically analyzing the number of engineering graduates across both countries and identifying potential imbalances across both countries caused by the differing rates of graduating engineers. It conducted causal and numerical analyses of publicly available documentation and statistics on the number of engineers graduating yearly in India and the US. It addressed factors that may have contributed to any differentials between the countries under a human capital theoretical framework for higher education enrollment. For additional context, the work presented the change in the number of engineering undergraduates concurrently with the rise of the outsourcing and offshoring of Information Technology (IT) and IT-enabled services jobs from the US to India.</p><p dir="ltr">This study was, in some ways, a follow-up to work conducted during the dawn of the outsourcing era, when researchers reported that the US was producing enough engineers for its needs and did not need to significantly increase its undergraduate output vis-à-vis developing countries such as China and India. While reading the available literature, I discovered that since 2019, Indian technology workers were working in the US on long-term non-immigrant visas. The number was in the hundreds of thousands, possibly even more than 1 million. An independent analysis of aggregate statistics for India-born technical professionals employed on these visas in the US was conducted to assess whether there are any cross-pollination effects on employment and human capital between the two countries. The findings informed the formulation of recommendations for policymakers on engineering education, as well as providing tangential takeaways for educators and business leaders in India and the US.</p>