Student Numbers Beginning to Grow

With the price of oil hanging high, changes are beginning to be detected in career choices for geoscience students at American universities and colleges. For years, the environmental side of geology — hydrology, pollution, regulatory work — was where the jobs were.

They still are — but with oil at $70 per barrel, students may now be willing to take a chance on an industry that not long ago was described as "sunset."

According to the results of a recent study on student trends taken by the American Geological Institute (AGI), the recent B-12 shot the industry has received in the form of higher oil prices has, in fact, caused some schools and students to re-focus on "old school" geology, though not at the expense of other ancillary programs.

"At the strong schools, the curriculum has remained fairly stable and focused on strong, fundamental geology programs," said Christopher M. Keane, who conducted the study for AGI. "Some of the schools with softer enrollments appear to be tweaking their core curriculum to address more environmental topics, and few seem to have made structural pushes into the geospatial analysis arena as a primary focus of their program.

"On average, programs that have retained a traditional geology core have remained strong," he said.

Keane is AGI's communications and technology director and editor for Geotimes. His study suggests that overall enrollments in the nation's university geology departments are up 5 percent per year over the last three years.

A caveat would be that the figures are not comprehensive: Laura Stafford, AGI's communication manager, said "schools do not do a good job of communicating changes to us, and I suppose we must not be doing a great job of getting these schools to send us updated information."

Promising Trends

Still, the figures that are available reveal some promising trends. A look at the numbers for the University of Texas at Austin, for example, shows a steady increase in both students enrolled and the numbers who have graduated since 2002 (figure 1).

Figure 1: University of Texas Geoscience Student Data

Source: American Geological Institute

The California Institute of Technology also showed an increase, especially in its doctorate programs, which had 137 students in 2002, compared with only 59 in 2000.

Keane, though, doesn't think university programs will see a windfall of students due to recent surges in oil prices.

"I think there remains a lot of memory about the hiring bubble in the 1980s among the faculty, and thus I do not expect to see a large adjustment of programs towards guiding students into industry," he said.

"One of the key things about the geosciences is that our enrollment is now better mirroring the other physical sciences again," he continued. "All of the physical sciences took enrollment hits during the dot-com boom, but have started to recover since."

This is borne out by another study done by AGI in 2003, which reported that 25 percent of geology students in Ph.D. programs dropped out because of a poor job market. With the recent surge in oil prices, that, at least, should no longer be the case.

Keane says he is unsure which order the cause and effect goes, but adds:

"Many of the departments over the last five years that have gone away had changed their curriculum into more specialty areas at the undergraduate level in efforts to increase student enrollments," he said.

"In some cases this failed; in others, the success has facilitated the evolution of the department from being strictly geology-centric," he added.

Room to Grow

There are about 30-40 schools, Keane believes, which have done and continue to do the heavy lifting when it comes to producing students for the petroleum industry. But there are now over 350 other schools with advanced geology programs in the country that are producing geologists of all stripes.

Some of those schools have reported figures to AGI, and the data suggests that, at least from 2001-04, no great shifts in enrollment numbers or graduation rates have occurred.

Asked what kinds of students are graduating, Keane was less than ebullient.

"We were hearing that on average the quality of new graduates remains satisfactory, but that incoming student quality remains an issue," he said. "The single greatest common issue with the student body is poor writing and business skills."

Of course, it doesn't matter how many or how good the students are if there aren't jobs for them when they graduate. And when prices are low, as they were in the early 1990s, companies do less exploring.

At $60 per barrel, though, the demand for good geologists once again increases.

Nevertheless, Keane suggests that the industry's demographics rather than prices have the biggest effect on occupational opportunities.

"Job opportunities are being driven by attrition of older workers in most sectors," he said.

Options Are Open

One sector where it's not, though, is in academia.

"It appears to me there are a lot of recent grads that are fixated on going into academia, and the retirement wave has not really hit that community yet, so the opportunities are a bit scarcer," even with a renewed oil and gas industry.

One such student is Eva-Maria Rumpfhuber, a transfer student from Austria, now studying at the University of Texas-El Paso, where during the past five years the numbers of students pursuing Ph.D.s has gone from 18 in 2000 to 43 in 2005.

Rumpfhuber said that for some students, what happens in the industry is less important than their own interests and goals. As for a job in oil and gas exploration, she is keeping her options open.

"In my internship this summer I got an insight in the oil industry, especially its R&D programs," she said. "Isn't it amazing that we are able to travel to the moon, but we have so many unanswered questions about the Earth?

"To me, the more I learn and the broader my background, the better I understand my own field," she said. "It will take a while until we have every problem solved, so there is no threat of getting bored in the geosciences."