Because they’re more likely to be terrorists (hat tip: Marginal Revolutions):
We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms.
While it’s been well-established that the highly educated middle class tend to be over-represented amongst terrorist groups, this report’s findings are very interesting as they highlight the specific social and economic factors which the United States will need to deal with to “win” the War on Terror. While a lot of attention was given to the finding that the terrorists involved in an attempted British airport bomb attack were doctors, this study finds that while highly educated people are over-represented in extremist groups, this over-representation is particularly strong for engineers and even stronger when one considers perpetrators of violence (of violent extremists, engineers are over-represented by a factor of more than double compared to other highly educated individuals and by a factor of nine when compared to the general population)!
The reasons they give seem to be little more than conjecture, but there’s little you can do with such a small sample size with such a large room for bias and with a subject that is difficult to study precisely. Essentially, the researchers attribute the over-representation of engineers amongst violent Islamic extremists (and less so among other extremist groups) to a combination of a lack of economic prospects for engineers in countries where Islamic fundamentalism is firmly rooted, a sense of cultural shame/emasculation stemming from the lack of progress that Islam has made in the modern world particularly with regards to engineering and science, and the tendency for engineers to hold fairly conservative views.
I don’t know what policy prescriptions one can deduce from this, but I’d like to see a politician construct a sensible policy from this — perhaps developing a strong student exchange program with foreign students, doctors, scientists, and engineers to reduce animosity amongst the key problem area?