U.S. Falling Behind China, India For New Engineering Graduates
Gennie Chen is the kind of student that science educators crow about and tech firms cultivate. She's also the type they're afraid of losing.

The 21-year-old UC Berkeley senior studied advanced placement math from age 11. At public high school in Fullerton, Calif., she took honors physics and chemistry. When it came time to take the SAT college entrance exam, she scored a perfect 800 on the math portion. In her spare time, she learned Java programming.

But when she had to choose her college major, the Taiwan native ditched the sciences — and her teenage dream of becoming a computer engineer.

Instead, she's completing a dual business and psychology degree. Post-graduation, she's accepted an offer from Goldman Sachs to work as an investment bank analyst.

Students like Chen have prompted an outpouring of worry from the country's biggest technology companies, science educators and engineering societies.

They say that without an adequate and growing supply of computer, math and engineering graduates, the U.S. will lose its current edge over emerging foreign tech centers as bases for creating new software, breaking ground on new tech innovations, and ultimately, producing more jobs.

"We face increased global demand for highly skilled scientists and engineers, at a time when American students seem to be walking away from careers in science and engineering," said National Science Foundation director Dr. Arden Bement last month.

Heightening the sense of urgency among U.S. educators and policymakers is the growing evidence that other countries' students are willing and able to fill any gap in the supply of tech workers.

In China, four in every ten university graduates gets an engineering degree, or 21% of all such degrees worldwide. Russia and India each produce 8% of all global engineering grads, said the American Electronics Assoc. and the National Science Foundation.

Hard Sciences' Hard Times

The United States, in contrast, turns out just 6% of the world's engineering work force, with one of every 20 U.S. undergrads choosing that field. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. freshman intending to major in computer science slipped from 16% in 2000 to 9.6% in 2002.

Microsoft's Bill Gates, Intel's Craig Barrett and Washington lawmakers have said the apparent distaste among U.S. students for hard sciences spells trouble.

"It's a big problem for us that we can't get these great students," said Gates earlier this year.

These same technology employers, meanwhile, have proved themselves increasingly fleet-of-foot when it comes to securing those graduates.

In December, Microsoft and Intel both announced plans to make major investments in India research & development centers. These included plans to hire at least 3,000 workers, and in Intel's case, invest $250 million in local startups.

Multinationals are no longer just looking to offshore systems maintenance work and routine coding. In a December survey, consultancy A.T. Kearney found global business executives ranked China and India as increasingly attractive locations for R&D.

That's an unsettling notion for U.S. engineers.

"Our companies are telling us that when they can't get workers in the U.S. they're being forced to look elsewhere to fill that position," said Matthew Kazmierczak, vice president for research at the American Electronics Association, a tech industry trade group.

"Everyone has a responsibility to show how rewarding careers can be in science and technology."

'At The Mercy Of The Economy'

But the reward for long hours required to complete an engineering or computer degree has lost some of its luster from engineering's 1960s heyday, when the U.S.-Russian space race inspired several generations of ambitious undergrads to pick up a slide rule.

Hard science got sexy again in the 1990s, when advances in computing and the Internet led to a surfeit of tech jobs and skyrocketing salaries. Then the dot-com crash laid off thousands of U.S. engineers.

For Chen, business beckoned when that period exposed the "perceived vulnerability" of computer science graduates, she said in a December phone interview.

As a freshman, she got her first corporate experience when she joined Berkeley Consulting, a student-run management advisory firm.

By her senior year, she had taught the LSATs, started her own consulting practice and interned at an investment bank.

"Even if you're a great programmer, you're at the mercy of the economy," she said. "In business, if there are no jobs out there, you can create your own."

The tech labor market has gone through many booms and busts. But the last one was particularly harsh.

From 2000-04, U.S. electrical engineers and computer scientists experienced higher levels of unemployment than during any other four-year period since 1972.

Joblessness for engineers at one point even bypassed the national rate, says IEEE-USA. And in 2003, median compensation fell for the first time since the trade group started surveying its members.

The job market for engineers and computer scientists has rebounded somewhat since then. Computer science grads from top schools can expect starting salaries of about $70,000, say students.

Indeed, the U.S. Labor Department expects science and engineering jobs to jump 47% over the next five years vs. 15% for all occupations. And in 2004, the number of science and engineering doctorates increased for a second year in a row after steadily declining from 1998, says the National Science Board.

Help Wanted

Plus, big tech firms say they have thousands of skilled job openings in the U.S. they can't fill.

Besides fewer new graduates, they say they're hampered by more limited visa processes for skilled foreign workers plus a mismatch between working engineers and the skills they need filled.

"We need more people with science and math skills and we are producing less of them," said Intel spokeswoman Tracy Koon.

Despite these lures, the perception of heightened job market competition — from previously laid off engineers, from cheaper foreign grads and from recent U.S. grads trained in the latest skill sets — continues to dull the industry's attractiveness.

"Programmers are commoditized. They can be replaced by any fresh graduate," said Herman Luk, a UC Berkeley senior with a dual major in computer science and business administration.

Plus, he said current conventional wisdom holds even the brightest engineer will always work for the guy or gal with the business degree.

His post-graduate plans? Luk plans to move to New York to take a job as a bond analyst for a big Wall Street firm.