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The United States, as well as the rest of the world, will face critical civil, environmental, energy, communication, manufacturing, and health-care challenges in the coming decades, and more scientists and engineers will be needed to address those problems. The number of jobs in the U.S. labor force requiring science and engineering skills, in fact, is growing almost five percent per year, while the rest of the job market is growing at just over one percent.
Ironically, at the same time that anxiety exists concerning how to increase U.S. engineering enrollments, many potential engineering students are wondering if most engineering jobs in the future won’t be sent offshore by U.S. employers to lower-wage engineers in places such as India, China, and Eastern Europe. And indeed, according to chemical-engineering educator Richard Felder, “The relentless movement of industry to computer-based design and operation and off-shoring of skilled functions and entire manufacturing operations is not about to go away. On the contrary, as computer chips get faster and developing countries acquire greater expertise and better infrastructure, the movement will inevitably accelerate.”
Yet, although IBM has 40,000 employees in India, it has significantly increased its hiring in the United States over the last five years.
What does this say about the need for U.S.-trained engineers? Felder believes that instead of just concentrating on analytical and problem-solving skills, we need to develop in American engineering students skills such as research creativity, entrepreneurial risk-taking, multi-disciplinary thinking, and the strong interpersonal and language skills that will enable them to function as self-directed, collaborative learners long after they leave the classroom.
Carolyn Plumb is the director of educational innovation and strategic projects for the College of Engineering at Montana State University. Plumb previously directed the engineering-communication program at the University of Washington and was an instructional development and assessment specialist for its School of Law. Richard M. Reis is the director of the Engineering Schools of the West Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as a consulting professor in electrical engineering and executive director of the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford University. He is the author of Tomorrow’s Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers in Science and Engineering (IEEE Press, 1997).
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