Finding and Keeping Technical Experts in the 1990s

Abstract

As the size of the college‐age shrinks, the number of engineering graduates also is dropping and the school‐age population consists increasingly of minority students. American engineering schools have come to rely heavily on an uncertain supply of foreign graduates to fill teaching needs; more than half of young U.S. assistant professors are foreign citizens. The number of women enrolling and graduating in engineering appears to have topped out at 15% of the baccalaureate class, while non‐Asian minorities are represented among engineering graduates at less than half of their proportion in the U.S. population. While it is not possible to know whether there will be a shortage of fully qualified engineers available to fill funded positions in academe, government, and industry over the next decade, it is certain that the best possible quality will not be achieved among those who are available unless efforts are made to involve a wider spectrum of the U.S. talent pool.