Engineer Shortage

The U.S., the world's greatest technological civilization, is running short of engineers. For years it looked as if there would be a glut, not a shortage. Engineering students used to spend their last spring in college like any other seniors: looking for jobs. But today industry competes for their services with the fierce cunning of Hollywood star-snatchers; they are wooed by eager personnel men, treated to lavish dinners, whisked off on inspection trips to factories. Most engineering graduates have at least half a dozen offers, with an average starting salary of $350 a month.

One large company recently offered to hire Yale's entire crop of graduate electrical engineers--sight unseen. Another promised the University of Santa Clara to employ even those engineering students who flunk their finals. Men about to be drafted are being signed to promissory contracts for the future. "It's like a fraternity rush," said the University of California's Associate Dean Everett Howe last week. "It's bad for the boys; it hurts their work and inflates their egos."

But there are just hot enough engineers to go around. Only 28,000 will graduate this June. Twice that number would not fill industry's demand.

Prophets & Experts. Enrollment in engineering schools is only slightly more than in 1940, while industry's demand has increased tremendously under the impetus of war production. Worried industrialists also blame 1) the low birth rate of the '30s, which has kept college classes limited; 2) the armed forces, which snatch many engineering students before private industry gets them (the greatest concentration of M.I.T. graduates in the world now works at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base); 3) a wrong steer (fostered by prophetic experts) that engineering would soon be an overcrowded profession.

Westinghouse statisticians calculate that in 1900 only one engineer was needed for every 250 workers in industry, by 1930 it took one engineer for 100, and soon one engineer will be needed for 50.

Fads & Favoritism. Industrialists admit that the shortage is partly their fault. A spokesman for U.S. Steel estimated last week that 75% of the jobs for which new engineers are hired could be filled by bachelors of arts. It has become a fad in U.S. industry to hire an engineer for almost any position. Today a man can study civil engineering, then get a sudden hankering for aeronautics, and any one of the major aircraft companies will hire him. If he tires of his slide rule and looks for work as a salesman, he will get preference because he is a trained engineer.

In one sense, the rush to hire engineers endangers the future supply. Seeing their former students get higher starting salaries in industry than they make after years of teaching, many instructors are quitting the campus. Few young men are filling the gaps in the teaching staffs.

Supply & Demand. What can be done? Educators and industrialists suggest some remedies:

P:Engineers should be more wisely and efficiently used in industry.

P:Women should be encouraged to go into certain types of engineering jobs. Last year, of some 40,000 engineering degrees granted, only 77 went to women.

P:High-school students with some technical schooling should be persuaded to continue at engineering schools rather than take high-paying jobs right away.

Despite industry's frantic efforts, the demand for engineers will continue to outstrip the supply--unless a sudden, unlikely end to world tension should bring a cutback of war production. The class of '52 is graduating into a technicians' world and an engineers' market.

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