Each year, about 100,000 students graduate worldwide with standard degrees (business, engineering, etc.) that include some elements of service science related course materials. This number is probably increasing by about 1,000 to 2,000 university graduates per year. About 9-10 million people worldwide graduate with college degrees every year… So about 1% of college graduates have some service science exposure, and this is growing by about 1-2% per year…
The growth is proportional to the size of the knowledge-intensive service sector in nations….
Globally service sector jobs are 40% of all jobs, and 50% of those are knowledge-intensive, so 20% of jobs world-wide are knowledge-intensive service sector jobs… to first approximation, think of knowledge-intensive jobs in banking, finance, health, education, government, legal, business professionals, science-technology-engineering professionals, etc. — all industry and societal sectors have executive, management, and technical-specialists who can be considered part of knowledge-intensive service workers – knowledge workers, for short.
These grow annually as a result of automation and urbanization. For example, (1) smarter machines and robotic processes continue to transform agriculture and manufacturing, and low-end service jobs (automation), and (2) villagers move to the cities around the world (urbanization)
The numbers increase every year, but the growth rate declines – because a larger percentage of the worlds population lives in cities doing service sector jobs…
(for example, in Europe almost everyone already lives in Cities, and North America will be next…)
So about 20% of all jobs worldwide are knowledge intensive service jobs, and this percentage is increasing by about 1-2% per year…
Of these knowledge-intensive service jobs, many need some post-secondary education, and many need college degrees.
The college degrees whether engineering or business degrees require some level of exposure to service science related concepts….
Service engineering, service computing, service marketing, service management, service operations, service design, etc.
So while we do not know how many students are graduating with service science degrees, we estimate that over 100,000 students are graduating each year with standard degrees that have some element of service science in them…. these students get jobs as computer scientists, industrial engineers, marketing, operations, etc. – which is there major degree… service science is being infused in their curriculum.
The world has ~3 billions workers…
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lab_for_tot-labor-force-total
Currently 6.7% of the world population holds a college degree, and that is increasing
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/19/percent-of-world-with-col_n_581807.html
Worldwide about 18 millions students enroll in colleage each year (2007)
http://howtoedu.org/college-facts/how-many-people-go-to-college-every-year/
Graduate rates around the world are about 40-50%
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/03/how-u-s-graduation-rates-compare-with-the-rest-of-the-world/
Of course, these are very rough estimates, and it would be a good service science PhD student project to improve our understanding of this…