Page 27: of Marine News Magazine (January 2025)

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Feature

Training & Education gency? We don’t know. And that’s need of training or recerti? cation to ed workplace. The most conspicuous because despite repeated requests to renew) had climbed to an all-time watershed moment for women on the U.S. Coast Guard – the regula- high of 18,639, while countless oth- the water was in the summer of 1974, tory body responsible for issuing ers (myself included) have ? nally let when 14 women entered the U.S. Mer- these documents – the data hadn’t the credentials lapse completely. chant Marine Academy at Kings Point. been made available by the time this Another might be graduation day for article went to press. We asked for Growing Future Mariners the class of 1980 at the Massachusetts these numbers in early November, The obvious answer involves an Maritime Academy, which was the last and then were subsequently forced to effort to encourage and recruit more all male maritime academy graduat- ? le a FOIA request; all to no avail. people to look at the waterfront as a ing class in the United States. Never

At a time when one of the most career. Some of that means bringing fear, and in the summer of 1977, six pressing issues facing the nation’s mari- that awareness down to the secondary women found themselves unhappily time industry is how to ? nd, train and schools and beyond into the elemen- doing pushups in the gym parking lot keep quali? ed mariners, the organiza- tary school classrooms. Various stake- in Buzzards Bay, forever changing the tion in charge of that database can’t pull holders have done admirably in that landscape of the school. Some of these up six simple data points. Marad puts regard. Maritime Education Pioneer graduated in 1981.

the number at somewhere “around (Captain) Art Sulzer immediately So, you ask, how are we doing in 200,000 mariners” but they probably comes to mind in that regard. Others the interim in changing that metric? don’t have any more success peeling the have joined him in that effort. Not too good, actually. Only 237 numbers out of the Coast Guard than I Another avenue involves the recruit- (11%) of the collective graduating did. It wasn’t always like this. That said; ment of women into what has histori- classes of all maritime academies for we provide the latest information avail- cally been (and still is) a male-dominat- the years 2017 and 2018 were female. able, Table 5, for your inspection.

In the bad news department (it’s al- ways something), just 4,330 licensed mariners were churned out by the maritime academies in the ? ve gradu- ating classes since 2019. How many of the existing pool of mariners from the 2019 count have retired? We just don’t know. But, if past trends are any indi- cation, we may be in a lot of trouble.

In 2017, for example, the U.S. Coast

Guard advised that 30,377 unlimited tonnage mariners were available in the manpower pool. Fast forward to No- vember 2019, that number – despite the record-breaking maritime academy output – had declined to 25,611; al- most 15%. And if that weren’t alarm- ing enough, the total mariner pool was declining during the same timeframe.

Separately, the number of Coast

Guard-issued unlimited tickets in ‘Continuity’ status (inactive and in www.marinelink.com MN 27|