Three years ago, then-President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law, hoping to give the U.S. semiconductor industry a boost amid strategic competition with China.

Since then, the federal government has been funneling billions of dollars into the sector, including investments in STEM education. Yet, according to a new study, there’s still a shortage of skilled workers to fill critical chip production jobs.

For more on this, Marketplace’s David Brancaccio spoke with Professor Andrea Belz, Vice Dean of Transformative Initiatives at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, who has some hard data on the STEM jobs needed versus people training in the pipeline. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: So, you got real-world data on what we need for tech jobs in America, but it's interesting where you got it. How did you track this down?

Andrea Belz: We downloaded job postings from a popular platform, and then looked at the job titles, but also the text of the jobs and the description of the company in order to see which job postings were relevant to our studies.

Brancaccio: And so data in hand, how bad is it? How are the needs of industry outstripping people getting trained for those jobs?

Belz: So first of all, our focus is the semiconductor industry because this was a study supported by the Department of Defense's Microelectronics Commons program, which is funded by the CHIPS Act. We looked at it for the spring of this year, and what we see in Southern California, which is our area of focus, is a big gap at the engineering level, meaning generally having a bachelor's degree in one of the engineering disciplines needed for chip production.

Brancaccio: I see now. You're used to going into class and seeing fresh-faced young people hungry to learn this stuff. What's holding the rest of them back? You've been thinking about this for a long time.

Belz: So if you look at the numbers, enrollment, in particular in electrical engineering disciplines, has been declining over the course of 30 years. And what we see is that many of the students who previously would have gone into engineering disciplines have been migrating to computer science because they were reading the tea leaves and going where the job openings were, and obviously, in the most recent data, you can imagine that computer science employment might be down a little bit, but it will be a small decline relative to the trends that we've seen over the last couple of decades. People don't major in electrical engineering the way they used to.

Brancaccio: What can policymakers do with that data? We're trying to fortify homegrown microchip manufacturing in America. In Southern California, there seems to be a mismatch between skills coming along and skills needed.

Belz: Some of the questions revolve around, "How do you direct resources toward training?" So, for instance, understanding the opportunities at the community college level, which will be highly regional, depending on whether there is a factory in that area or not. I think continuing to understand national solutions will not be one-size-fits-all, and certain areas of the country will have different needs than others, and so you need to tailor your solutions accordingly.

Brancaccio: I mean, it must be true that some other countries are better at this than we are in terms of bolstering the pipeline of STEM people.

Belz: If you look at a list, at least from a few years ago, we saw that China produces four times more STEM graduates than we do. We appear somewhere in the top 10, but not at the top, and we're not in the top five.