Civil engineering doctorates awarded

It turns out that the more Americans we convince to study the structural integrity of bridges and dams, the more of us fall out of bed and die, which is either a cosmic joke about the futility of expertise or a reminder that the universe has a wry sense of proportion. One might expect civil engineering doctorates to correlate with, say, better buildings or fewer bridge collapses, but instead they correlate with bedtime fatalities, which suggests either that doctoral programs are deeply stressful or that the universe simply cannot resist a good punchline.

What's likely happening here is that both metrics are riding the wave of overall population growth and demographic aging between 2005 and 2021—more Americans means more doctoral programs (including engineering) and also more elderly people, who fall out of bed with the kind of statistical reliability that would impress an engineer. Bed-related deaths spike sharply in people over seventy-five, and during this same seventeen-year period the US population aged considerably; a seventy-five-year-old in 2005 was less likely to be in a statistics column than one in 2021, but vastly more likely to meet their end via mattress. Meanwhile, the expansion of STEM education tracks neatly alongside economic growth cycles and university expansion, completely unrelated to whether anyone actually stayed in bed.

This is what happens when you line up two entirely separate human enterprises—the slow march toward credentialing people in structural analysis and the steady, unglamorous business of falling—and discover they've been dancing together the whole time. They are not dancing intentionally. We are simply very good at seeing waltz patterns in what is, statistically speaking, two separate orchestras playing in different rooms, and this probably says something important about how we understand the world, though what exactly remains delightfully unclear.