President Barack Obama announced an initiative to train an additional 10,000 engineers to boost competitiveness in innovation during a speech in Durham on Monday.
According to the president, a strong economy depends on innovation and manufacturing stateside.
“Breakthroughs…have the potential to create new jobs in other sectors of the economy as well,” Obama said while discussing the chain effect of engineering new technologies.
These breakthroughs require extensive research and development. The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, led by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and CEOs of major corporations, met on Centennial Campus Monday morning to discuss the nation’s future in meeting its engineering needs.
“The job council is all about what we can do immediately to stimulate employment—to get more people back to work,” Chancellor Randy Woodson said after the round-table conference. “The administration came here because they wanted to see the FREEDM Center, which is a center focused on power distribution, but there are a lot of small companies in the Triangle that are involved in this part of creation of new jobs.”
According to N.C. Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, the morning conference was a way to bring the spotlight to the state’s advancements in technology and engineering.
“If you look around the country, there are a number of places of innovation, but RTP is one of the first and foremost,” Hagan said. “The innovation that’s going on in RTP as well as job creation is very important. That is why the president and the economic council came here.”
The president started his tour on jobs and competitiveness in January and during his stop at LED technology company Cree, Inc., Obama said STEM—science, technology, engineering and math—are the jobs of the future.
“These are the jobs that China and India are cranking out,” Obama said. “Those students are hungry because they understand if they get those skills they can find a good job, they can create companies, they can create businesses, create wealth.”
Lawrence Jacobson, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers, said the issue for the U.S. is not meeting the new expectation per se, but putting greater emphasis on STEM training and education.
“The number 10,000 is arbitrary,” Jacobson said. “We’re going to need a lot more than that. I totally agree, we need more engineers and more innovation. The country really needs this not to just compete, but to also replace the baby-boomer population.”
According to Jacobson, the current recession has kept a majority of older, more-experienced engineers from retiring.
“What’s happened is the engineers working in all kinds of industry, the big bulk of them are all baby boomers and they are due to retire over a period of five to six years, and most of those guys were some sort of product of the Cold War era. They were going to school on Veterans’ Affairs bills, but back in the 70s and 80s, there were a whole lot of ‘flower children’ not interested in that. So STEM became unpopular for two decades.”
According to Jacobson, the lag in engineer training during the 70s and 80s has created a void that must be filled. But Jacobson also referred to a culture change to compensate for “lost time.”
“At the most fundamental level, we need a cultural shift,” Jacobson said. “If we are going to compete, we are going to need to crank out better-quality education. The rest of the world is at school six days a week. The heroes need to be STEM people, not people that get to dribble a basketball. We can’t assume that we are better than everyone else — because we’re not.”
A report by the American Society of Engineering Education cites that 74,000 engineers graduated with undergraduate, graduate and doctorate degrees in 2009. Of the 41,632 Masters degrees awarded, 44.1 percent were to foreign nationals. At MIT, two-thirds of the graduate student population is foreign. And Jacobson said this is a problem.
“Many of these foreign nationals use our education system and then return to their home countries,” Jacobson said.
That’s where the Centennial Campus conference on jobs and competitiveness comes in.
Mark Munday, electrical engineering graduate of 1979 and CEO and president of the engineering firm Elster Solutions, said the private sector can work in the solution to expand the engineering work force.
“Elster is a very strong engineering company, and the things we have been able to do is prove our stuff works,” Munday said. “We just hired 115 new folks locally and we’re working on making advancements in our technological needs—smart grids being one of them.”
The White House caravan came in and left quickly, but according to Engineering Dean Louis Martin-Vega, the University will work to meet the need for engineers.
“We are working here to make sure our students have all the tools appropriate to advance in their fields,” Martin-Vega said. “Technology drives everything that is going on. You’ll find that most of the engineering disciplines are really converging around the issues of energy and sustainability, and health and security, so a lot of the people that are in engineering fields are graduating very well-prepared to meet these challenges.”
