Over at
Ars Technica, Hannibal has written another gem,
Sizing up the competition: what can Duke tell us about America's high-tech future? about how a
Duke study debunks the "India and China graduate more engineers" myth.
In a nutshell, their study found that " America generates a much higher number of engineers per capita than either of these two countries" - a somewhat different story than we're used to hearing these days! The study discusses some of the sources of this discrepancy (types of degrees and fields included in the statistics, etc.), but I wouldn't call it a "definitive" study as it is narrowly-focused and the authors admit to difficulty in obtaining comparable statistics from China and the US. Still, their conclusions seem well-supported by their research. They also provide a definition of "engineer" which should draw a few comments on these fora.
The Ars article goes on to discuss some other "metrics" used to show how America is losing it's edge and an interesting economic analysis on foreign workers in the US. Worth a read.