RAPID - Impacts of COVID-19 on the Geoscience Enterprise: How Permanent Will Academic Program and Workforce Changes Be?

The rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden dramatic actions taken by society to protect public health have led to significant economic and social disruption of indeterminant duration. This one-year project by the American Geological Institute seeks to capture the nature and extent of the impact of COVID-19 responses on the geoscience workforce and geoscience academic programs. It will also track those changes through the period when businesses, educational institutions, and citizens resume in-person interactions. This longitudinal study aims to understand how geoscience employers and educational institutions are changing their workplace and instructional environments. It will also seek to discover which of the implemented changes to normal operations will be remain in place once institutions and companies resume pre-COVID-19 operations. Broader impacts of the work will help academic institutions, employers, and decision makers in geoscience-related fields move forward effectively in the potentially changed post-COVID environment. It will also help improve response- and recovery-planning for future crises. Although focusing on a single scientific and economic sector, additional broader impacts of the project will be an increased understanding of the short and long-term impacts of crises to the workforce and on education and the private sector, as well as economic impacts for supply chains and workforce/educational institution resilience.

This study conducted by the American Geophysical Institute (AGI) will establish a baseline of pre- and post- COVID-19 workplace environments and an understanding of the types, magnitude and permanency of changes to geoscience academic programs and departments, employers, and the workforce. The project's results will be useful for informing future areas of research as well as those related to human-technology interfaces and new approaches in learning and teaching within digital environments. To conduct the project, the investigators will collect and follow, over a 52-week period, both publicly available workforce and economic data. This information will be combined with survey results for five cohorts: (1) geoscience employers, (2) geoscience workers (as of start of the crisis), (3) academic faculty, (4) geoscience college and university students, and (5) recent geoscience graduates who graduated between 2014 and 2019. These cohorts will be established by sending invitations to over 800 U.S. degree-granting and community-college geoscience programs, to AGI's member societies membership networks, and to AGI's contact network of over 124,000 geoscience professionals. AGI will survey each participant at least every other week to assess employment status and/or status of employees, work environment, work activities, and challenges faced. In addition, AGI will utilize the publicly available economic and workforce data to provide a broader context to the macroeconomic dynamics of the survey results. Weekly data briefs will be published on the AGI website to report on the ongoing state of the geosciences and new insights from the federal and/or survey data. It will also publish a synthesis report that details the changes each of the considered cohorts experienced, including the duration and permanency of changes to the work environment and cohort work status. Reports will examine survey results in the light of reported geoscience employment and economic indicators from federal agencies and assess any lags between federal data and survey responses. The report will be available in hard copy and freely available in digital format on AGI's website. Digital copies will be sent to all geoscience university and college programs. Summary results of the final report will also be published online, used in conference presentations, and if appropriate, published in peer-reviewed journals.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.