The problem of unemployment is prevalent even among the well- educated and talented DOST scholar-graduates. This is one significant finding revealed by the preliminary data of the tracer study done by the UP Statistical Center Research Foundation. Out of the 987 scholar-graduates who responded to the survey questionnaire, 513 or 52% are unemployed as to the time of survey. The reasons cited by those who are unemployed are: lack of better job opportunities, currently studying, illness, and simply not having the need to work.

Most of the employed respondents work full-time. Those working part-time cited studying, not finding available full-time jobs, family responsibilities, illness or not wanting to work full-time as the reasons for the nature of their employment.

Many of the employed graduates perform jobs related to their educational training, mostly technical work but earning only P10,000 and below. Those who took jobs unrelated to their field of expertise mentioned the reasons as lack of available jobs appropriate to their training, shift in interest, result of upward mobility/promotion in his organization and family business.

These preliminary findings are limited to the 1,063 sampled scholar-graduates who finished their courses during the period 1988-2001. The study is therefore only within a 14-year backtracking period and does not represent the total picture for the whole program since its inception in 1958.

However, its results could at best be an indication of the difficulty of the scholars in finding meaningful employment after graduation, a factor that contributes to the dwindling pool of scientific and technical human resources in the country. Such problems of unemployment and underemployment of scholars could be related to the current economic crisis, the mismatch between the expertise required or demanded by the employers and the expertise of the scholar-graduates supplied by the program, the oversupply of S&T graduates in certain areas of the country, and the recruitment preferences of the industry-employers. Findings in a separate S&T Human Resource Requirements Study revealed that there is a high employment rate in the industry sector in the areas of education, agriculture, mathematics, physics, optometry and veterinary medicine. Likewise, an increasing demand for S&T graduates is seen to occur in Regions 4, 5, 8 , 9, 11 and CARAGA and a declining demand in Regions 2, 3, 6, 10 and NCR. The same study revealed that the industry-employers prefer graduates of computer science-related fields from major schools such as the University of the Philippines System, Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, Saint Louis University, Central Luzon State University, University of San Carlos and Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology.

The Department of Science and Technology (DOST), through the Science Education Institute (SEI), provides for more than 3,500 scholarship slots every year to deserving high school graduates wishing to pursue science and technology courses. This is a strategy which aims to replenish and substantially increase the number of S&T personnel in the country needed to ensure quality and productivity along the areas of operations, research and development, and training in the industry, academe, government institutions and other sectors.