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An indication of the slowness of the rate of progress at Geneva in the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea is the fact that at least two more sessions are now envisaged; the next will be convened in a year's time at UN Headquarters in New York. Little likelihood is therefore seen of an acceptable convention being hammered out before the end of 1976 at the earliest and it could not possibly come into force for at least two years after that. Progress has definitely been made, however, not least with the proposals covering scientific research.
After the lean years of the early 1970s the traditional employment of science graduates is picking up, but the result is likely to be a shortage because the graduates have found that non-traditional jobs can be quite attractive.
After a period of rapid growth, enrolment in higher education in the United States is levelling off. The result is likely to be an increasingly bleak academic job market for scientists and engineers with PhD degrees and the trend has major implications for the nature of graduate education.
Although India educates large numbers of scientists and technologists, there is a considerable brain drain as a result of lack of opportunities for employment. To make full use of their trained manpower, the Indian government has started some schemes to help scientists who wish to return home.
Employer of 17,000 scientists, the British Civil Service faces special problems in the motivation and use of its more senior members. Maybe this calls for some fairly radical solutions.
Manpower forecasting as a basis for educational or economic planning in the long term is fraught with problems, but a more important problem on a short time scale is the annual variation in the employment of new graduates by industry, particularly in the UK. Smoothing this out would probably lead to more consistency in the flow of students from schools to science departments in universities.
Specialised graduates in the fields of petroleum geology, geophysics and petroleum engineering will be needed to man Britain's participation in the North Sea oil industry. Three universities in Britain have been identified as the centres for the necessary training effort. This article reviews the progress made so far.
A small country engrossed in the problems of immigrant absorption, Israel could either limit its responsibility for the growth of her exploding academic personnel, or risk a breakthrough in a new kind of scientific manpower.
