Innovation March-April 2023

W e could blame quirky The Big Bang Theory who was constantly lamenting "geology isn't a real science." We could point to images of mining catastrophes from the past. We could cite the path of the stock market. involves digging into several factors. Since 2014, the number of students entering university taking geoscience related programs has steadily dropped, according to figures from Geoscientists Canada. While the number of students was growing for the previous decade, the number enrolling now has fallen back to 2007 levels (see chart page 19). Engineers and Geoscientists BC CEO Heidi Yang, P.Eng., noted that a drop in university enrollments will have downstream effects on professional registration. "The profession of geoscience comes from a pipeline. If right now the university numbers are dropping that means in three to five years, we're going to see a drop in the geoscience applications to us because there are fewer people in the pipeline." theoretical physicist Sheldon from the popular TV series And, we would be right. Because to understand why the demand for geoscientists is outstripping the number of qualified, available geoscientists, it

With a strong uptick in jobs in mineral exploration in BC thanks to healthy market conditions, the fear is there will not be enough qualified applicants entering the field to meet the demand. At the Association for Mineral Exploration BC (AME), Kendra Johnston, P.Geo. president and CEO, said, "I'm hearing that the demand is extremely high and that the supply of new geologists—the kids going into earth science and geoscience programs—is still dropping." Geoscientists Canada CEO Andrea Waldie, P.Geo., has also watched the dwindling numbers over the years. "The trend is not good," she said. "The prevailing thought is it's going to get worse.” WHERE HAVE ALL THE STUDENTS GONE? Dr. Brent Ward, P.Geo., a professor at SFU in earth sciences, remembers a once-booming student enrolment in earth sciences. "Our enrolments were much higher 10 years ago when we started to talk about having to start offering field schools twice a year because it was hard to do a field school with 60 people," explained Ward. "Now, we're not worried about that anymore; we're worried about having enough students to justify running it."

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