It’s back to school for colleges across the United States, and if U.S. President Donald Trump has it his way, more and more students will be studying to transform the country into a critical minerals superpower.
The depleted state of the U.S. mining workforce has been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration’s ambitions, with more than half of the current mining workforce—or around 221,000 workers—estimated to retire by 2029, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME), a professional association based in Colorado.
Analysts have warned that the United States does not have the people to power a mining renaissance, as years of largely outsourcing the industry overseas have left the country with an aging workforce that isn’t equipped to contend with Chinese competitors.
“It’s like all of a sudden, if you told me that we’ve got to set up a cricket league that’s got to compete against India and Pakistan next year,” said David Abraham, a rare-earths expert and author of The Elements of Power. “It’s a huge challenge.”
In August, the Trump administration unveiled plans to pump some $180 million into U.S. mining schools, with the goal of turbocharging talent pipelines and doubling their number of graduates within the next two years. And at the forefront of that effort are mining engineers, who oversee the lifecycle of mines and can take on careers in areas ranging from mine design and safety to environmental specialties.
The United States is currently home to 14 mining schools, down from 25 in the 1980s. Those schools collectively graduate between 150 and 200 mining engineers a year, which doesn’t even meet the current demand for graduates, said Aaron Noble, the head of the mining and minerals engineering department at Virginia Tech.
That number also pales in comparison to the mining graduates that China boasts—a gap that Trump himself pointed to when announcing the administration’s newest investments last month.
“For years, mining schools and colleges that are essential to training the future leaders of this industry have been absolutely and sadly disappearing,” he said. “Accredited mining programs in the United States now graduate less than 170 mining engineers each year, while China graduates more than 3,000.”
In fact, just one Chinese university enrolls more mining engineering students than all of the U.S. mining programs combined, according to 2022 data from SME.
That discrepancy has stark ramifications for the expertise available in the United States. “It’s difficult to find the talent” outside of China, said Wade Senti, the president of Florida-based Advanced Magnet Lab, which manufactures permanent magnets.
At the university level, student interest in the sector has largely fallen over the decades. In recent times, undergraduate mining engineering enrollment and the number of degrees awarded in the field peaked a little more than a decade ago, around 2013 and 2014, according to data from SME. Since then, both numbers have broadly declined until 2023—the last year of publicly available data—although there has been a slight uptick in the number of degrees awarded.
“To be honest, mining is not sexy,” said Jaeheon Lee, a professor in the mining engineering department at the Colorado School of Mines. The challenge is “to make our program more attractive, not only to students, but also these days, [to] their parents.”
Mining may now be getting a makeover. While the sector has a fraught environmental and social reputation, with a long legacy of pollution and mine disasters, the Trump administration has made mineral security a top priority as commodity supply chains have been weaponized in trade wars. The geopolitical spotlight on so-called critical minerals—or a grouping of minerals deemed essential to economic and national security—may now have elevated them in the public eye.
“I think the whole conversation on critical minerals is a whole rebranding exercise,” Abraham, said.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that that surge in attention is translating to an increase in university enrollment. At the Colorado School of Mines, undergraduate enrollment in mining engineering has doubled in recent years, from around 100 students three years ago to 200 this year, said Bill Zisch, the head of the school’s mining engineering department.
“Frankly, one of the challenges that we’re having as we start the school year is finding out where we can find classrooms to put the increase in students,” he said. “We’re starting to see direct impacts from, I think, the recognition of its importance.”
Virginia Tech is also seeing an explosion in interest. Noble, the head of the school’s mining engineering department, told Foreign Policy that in the 2020 admissions cycle, only two students applied to the university indicating interest in mining engineering, which was “effectively nobody,” he said. In this last admission cycle, that number was 55.
Demand for graduating students is high. The university hosts its own mining-specific career fair, which can only accommodate 50 companies due to space limitations, Noble said. The companies are primarily U.S. firms and broadly cover the mining sector, ranging from crushed stone and aggregate producers to various equipment and service providers. Those 50 companies recruited from a graduating pool of roughly 30 students last year, and 20 students the year before that, he said.
“You’ve got 20 graduates, 50 companies there, most of the companies seeking full-time employment,” he said, adding that all his students graduate with multiple job offers. “You can imagine what that looks like from the student’s perspective and the employer’s perspective.”
As the Trump administration aims to double the number of mining graduates, one big challenge will be scaling up academic capacity and hiring, as well as investing in faculty. SME estimated that more than half of the mining workforce—or around 221,000 workers—will retire by 2029, and universities are grappling that reality at the same time that is Trump going all-in on mining education.
“Most of the faculty right now are approaching retirement age, some very specialized fields of study,” Noble said. “There’s only a handful of people in the U.S. with that type of expertise, and so we have a continual need to think about our capacity.”
All that training takes time. For some skill sets, it could take years for individuals to gain the necessary experience, including undergraduate schooling, advanced degrees, and potential industry experience, Senti said.
Given the amount of time that it takes to build up that domestic expertise, one option could be recruiting foreign talent to help plug its mineral vulnerabilities. But the administration’s crackdown on immigration has also made it more difficult for U.S. firms to hire and retain foreign talent, on top of complicated compliance rules for defense-related issues.
“If someone’s on H-1B, they may not be able to work on certain things,” Senti said. “Honestly, it limits your ability to hire potential talent that’s not a permanent U.S. citizen.”
Washington’s immigration measures appear to be clouding the academic sector, too. Ian Lange, a mineral economist at the Colorado School of Mines, said that the school’s mineral economics program—which is the only one in the country—was about half foreign students in 2022 and 2023. Those numbers are now down, he said.
“Certainly, it’s been more difficult for foreign talent to get to the United States in the last two years,” he said. That has “translated into employers sort of shying away from hiring foreign talent out of universities.”
The Trump administration, for its part, is moving ahead at full speed. But for all of Washington’s investments in mining education, it will take time for them to pay off, analysts said.
“It takes people a tremendous amount of time to get in, to understand,” Abraham said. “We’ll eventually get there, but we don’t have the people who can compete broadly at the moment.”
Maxine Davey contributed graphics assistance.
