Civil engineering doctorates awarded

From 2007 to 2021, the number of civil engineering PhDs awarded in the US tracked the volume of video uploaded to YouTube per minute at a correlation of 0.97, which raises the alarming possibility that structural engineers are responsible for a significant portion of internet content. They are not. But somewhere out there a freshly minted civil engineering doctorate is posting a 47-minute video about load-bearing walls, and the data has noticed.

US civil engineering doctorate awards grew modestly from roughly 1,000 per year in 2007 to around 1,800 by 2021, driven by infrastructure investment interest, federal research funding, and growing graduate enrollment in engineering programs. YouTube upload rates grew from about 6 hours per minute in 2007 to over 500 hours per minute by 2021, driven by platform growth, smartphone adoption, and the democratization of video production. Both are long-term upward trends in entirely separate domains that happen to share a 15-year growth window.

Enough time series data and every upward trend will find another upward trend to correlate with. The civil engineer and the content creator are both products of an expanding, credentialing, uploading society — and that is where their relationship ends.