#k12engineering

More specifically, how many K-12 engineering teachers are there in the USA?  That’s a hard number to find online, apparently.  I did some digging at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Science Teachers Association, and other data sources, and none seem to have a clear answer.  So I tried to combine all the most freely accessible data to estimate the number of teachers there are.

First, Indeed Job Trends tells us the relative rates of job listings for “engineering teacher”, “science teacher”, “math teacher”, and “technology teacher” (http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-%22engineering-teacher%22-q-%22science-teacher%22-q-%22math-teacher%22-q-%22technology-teacher%22.html).  The amount of “engineering teacher” listings is almost nonexistent, relative to all other listings, so I went to the best-case scenario of around May 2014, where there’s a small bump in demand for engineering teachers.  At that time, the number of science teacher listings, math teacher listings, and technology teacher listings were, respectively, 34.6x greater, 36.3x greater, and 10.9x greater than the number of engineering teacher listings.  That means, for example, that for every 1 job listing at that time for an engineering teacher, there were about 34.6 listings for a science teacher.  

I’ll assume that these relative ratios of job listings on Indeed at that time also match the relative prevalence of engineering teachers to other teachers in American schools.  In other words, I’ll assume that for every 34.6 science teachers out there, there is 1 engineering teacher.  I’m sure this is a vast simplification, but you have to start somewhere.

Now that I have some relative numbers, I just need numbers for the total number of K-12 science teachers, math teachers, or technology teachers in the US, and then I can try to extrapolate the number of engineering teachers from that.  The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) lists in their website that they estimate there to be 2 million science teachers in elementary and high school in the US, combined (http://www.nsta.org/about/clpa/faq.aspx)  I don’t know how they got that number, but let’s go with that.  If my earlier assumption was true, then I can estimate the number of K-12 engineering teachers as 2 million divided by 34.6, resulting in about 60 thousand K-12 engineering teachers (accounting for only one significant digit).  That’s a lot!

The NSTA also estimates on that same webpage that of the 2 million science teachers, 400 thousand are high school science teachers.  Going with the same logic as before, that implies that there are about 10 thousand high school engineering teachers out there.  So if I have about 100 high school engineering teachers listening to my podcast right now, I’ve got about 1% of the entire market of high school engineering teachers.  Amazing!  

All these numbers are extremely fuzzy, of course.  Can we do any better?  Maybe.  The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the number of secondary teachers out there as just under 1 million, or 962,820 to be exact, as of May 2015 (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252031.htm), but unfortunately I can’t find more granular data than that.  How many of these teachers are science teachers, math teachers, or technology teachers?  Or engineering teachers for that matter?  Actually, we know that none of those teachers are “career and technical education” teachers, based on how the Bureau classifies its data, so there’s that.  However, we have to do a bit more work to use the data.

The Indeed Job Trends data for science and math teachers can be summed; then we have that there were 70.9x more job listings for both science or math teachers than there were for engineering teachers.  Again, we assume job listings ratios match actual employment ratios, so that there are 70.9 high school math or science teachers for every 1 high school engineering teacher.  I’ll also (ridiculously) assume that all those teachers listed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics are math or science teachers.  Then we can divide the 962,820 high school teachers by 70.9, resulting in 13.6 thousand high school engineering teachers.  We also know that should be an overestimate of the true number of high school engineering teachers, since not all high school teachers are science or math teachers.  So let’s say we cut the calculated value in half, and say that the number of engineering teachers is 6.8 thousand. That sort of matches was estimated from the NSTA data!  OK, that’s not bad.

Going even further, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has separate data for the career/technical education teachers (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252032.htm).  As of May 2015, there were 77,430 teachers of this type in high school.  Indeed Job trends estimates 10.8 technology teacher listings for every 1 engineering teacher listing, and so going through our calculations again, dividing 77,430 by 10.8, we can estimate that there are about 7130 high school engineering teachers.  This still rounds up to 10k, so that’s still in the ballpark!  

The rough convergence of three calculations for high school engineering teachers gives me more confidence in the broader number of about 60 thousand engineering teachers across K-12.  That’s pretty incredible, because I hadn’t expected such a high number.  These teachers most likely aren’t solely teaching engineering, especially in elementary and middle school, but it’s interesting to think that 60 thousand people in America are bringing design thinking and technical problem-solving to kids in some form or another.