Enrollment in America`s engineering schools is declining, even though engineering jobs are plentiful, and experts fear a shortage of engineers that could doom the country to second-class technology.
Just as unskilled manufacturing jobs left the United States in droves the last two decades, many highly skilled research and development posts that drive high-technology industries likely will be lost during the next decade because there won`t be enough trained people to fill them.
Engineering educators are troubled especially that the reasons behind falling enrollments apparently are so complex that no clear set of actions, even with massive funding to implement them, seems likely to reverse things.
Simply put, say the engineers, their profession is so difficult to learn that most young people entering college today-even the bright ones capable of the work-would rather study something easier, such as business administration, marketing or accounting.
Despite good pay and plentiful jobs, they worry that the life of an engineer doesn`t convey the intellectual excitement or social prestige that would lure more young people to engineering schools.
There are myriad other problems, such as poor science and math training for most high school students and society`s discouragement of girls who would make good engineers. But at bottom, engineers suggest, is the perception that engineering is for ”nerds” and that other careers are easier, more glamorous and, in the long run, pay better.
Freshman enrollment in America`s engineering schools, which topped off at 115,000 in 1981 and 1982, has dropped well below 95,000. Inquiries to admissions offices suggest that the decline will continue this fall.
This slide reflects something more than overall lower numbers of students entering school. Surveys show that in 1982, 12 precent of new college students said they considered engineering careers. Now, only 8 percent do. Also, it used to be that 8 percent of students considered going into computer sciences, and that has dropped to 3 percent.
Clearly, engineering is losing appeal to young people.
”There is just no shortcut to learning things like how big a heat exchanger has to be to handle a given job,” said Samuel Hulbert, president of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Ind. ”It`s not a common sense thing. You just have to do a lot of hard work. We haven`t found a way of making engineering more fun.”
Indeed, as the rush of technological advance makes the world more complex, engineering becomes more difficult, said Hulbert, because students have to learn a lot of new material along with all the traditional skills.
At Northwestern University, Jerome Cohen, engineering dean, said it is now assumed that engineers must spend the rest of their lives studying. All a bachelor`s education can do is provide the foundation for what they must learn in order to practice engineering.
But technology`s increasing complexity isn`t the total problem, either.
”When I went to engineering school in the `60s, it was expected that everyone would study 50 to 60 hours a week,” Cohen said. ”That was typical. Now, they expect to study 20 to 30 hours a week. No wonder they have trouble.”
Engineering educators agree that long-held American attitudes work against recruitment. Engineering is seen as way for a working class family`s son to learn a profession and join the middle class.
”Sons of immigrants and farmers have been traditional pools for new engineers,” said George Bugliarello, president of the Polytechnic Institute of New York. ”But sons of engineers traditionally don`t go into engineering. They become doctors, lawyers or accountants.”
Although immigrants are still a big source of engineering students, fewer young people live in rural America, and that is one piece of the problem, Bugliarello said.
”Farm kids grew up with tractors and other machinery. Engineering seemed natural to them,” he said. ”But now kids grow up in suburbs and with television. They go into marketing.”
Engineering commands greater respect as a profession in Japan, which produces as many engineers a year as the U.S. with half the population, and in Europe. In Italy, an engineer carries his title before his name just as a physician does, Hulbert noted. And, like physicians, sons of engineers often learn their father`s profession.
Americans have never fully appreciated engineering`s value, Bugliarello said. When Japanese products became competitive with American goods, most people attributed it to cheaper labor, he said, but it is now apparent that better engineering was the key.
”They would invest twice the engineering talent into developing a new product as Americans,” he said, ”and the result was superior products.”
Bugliarello was impressed when he visited Japan 25 years ago and observed work in naval architecture. The Japanese had designed a new bulbous bow for a ship that produced a negative wave to counteract the normal wave a boat makes as it cuts through the water.
”The negative wave reduced the effect of the positive wave, and the result was less resistance as the ship moved through the water. This saved energy,” Bugliarello said. ”I knew then that it wasn`t cheap labor we were competing with, it was quality engineering. You could see the writing on the wall.”
Working engineers, educators and industrial managers are frightened at the prospect of a United States unable to do its own research and development or even design its own sewer systems and bridges because of a lack of skills. America is spread thin technologically because engineers in many fields are in short supply. Many who work as engineers today were educated 30 years ago in the wake of the big push in science education that followed the Soviet launching of the Sputnik spacecraft. These engineers will be retiring soon.
”We are already short of engineers,” Bugliarello said. ”In Long Island, there are companies that cannot find the people they need in the Northeast and have to hire engineering firms from the South and West. I know of companies that are farming out research and development to Italian engineers because it is cheaper.”
Right now, if federal and state governments decided to invest heavily in rebuilding the nation`s infrastructure, they would run into trouble, because there isn`t enough U.S. engineering talent available to do the job, he said.
Every year, the shortage will worsen prospects for the economy across the board.
”It isn`t just high technology you have to think about,” Bugliarello said. ”All these financial centers are heavily dependent upon computer engineers and programmers, and we`re running short of them, too.”
Several remedies are being applied. At Northwestern, Cohen said, they emphasize recruiting of women and minorities, which now comprise about half the enrollment.
At the Illinois Institute of Technology`s west campus in Glen Ellyn on Friday, the school will be host to nearly 400 pupils from middle and high schools who will meet an astronaut and get hands-on instruction in engineering technology.
This outreach, featuring robots and space exploration, is in its fifth year, said Ruth Sweetser, IIT West administrator.
”We definitely view this as early intervention,” she said. ”We`re doing whatever we can to get young people interested in these fields as a career.”
