Miyazawa Fails Homework on Grad Students

Statistics indicate that Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa did not do his homework when he suggested that there is a relationship between the graduate school preferences of American students and the U.S.-Japan trade imbalance.

Miyazawa said Monday that the United States lost some of its competitive edge in manufacturing in the past decade, partly because many American college graduates “landed high-paying jobs on Wall Street and as a result . . . the number of engineers able to make products has fallen year after year.”

However, according to the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service, the number of Americans taking the engineering test for graduate school rose to 17,199 in 1988, from 8,122 in 1977, suggesting that the number of advanced degree engineers has been rising.

And, while the number of students applying for M.B.A. degrees rose in the 1980s, Wall Street investment firms have been hiring fewer of those graduates. More and more students are seeking M.B.A. degrees to prepare for better positions in fields other than investment banking, said Bill Broesamle, president of the Los Angeles-based Graduate Management Admission Council, which helps develop academic standards for graduate schools.

“M.B.A. students were more interested in Wall Street jobs in the 1980s because of the heavy (corporate) merger and acquisition activity during that period,” Broesamle said. ‘There’s been less Wall Street demand for M.B.A. graduates in the 1990s, but other industries have compensated for that drop in demand.”