Bull Market for Engineers

By Kenneth M. Pierce

Schools and industry compete for baccalaureates and Ph.D.s

Anthony Lucido, 35, had been offered a tenured assistant professorship at the nation's largest engineering school, Texas A.&M. He would have earned roughly $30,000 teaching computer science. But then a Houston computer firm named Intercomp offered Lucido a job with a pay boost of nearly 50%, plus the chance to tinker with half a million dollars worth of computer graphics equipment far newer than anything to be found on campus. Lucido said goodbye to tenure and went to work for Intercomp. He recalls: "I was disillusioned with academe. There was no money for research projects, and I finally decided there was just no future in staying at the university."

Tales like this are all too familiar to the deans of U.S. engineering schools, who find themselves hopelessly outmatched in the intense competition for top talent in a soaring job market for engineers. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been trying for four years to fill three vacant assistant professorships in the growing field of electrical engineering. The University of Illinois is desperately trying to recruit 30 more professors for an engineering staff that normally numbers 400. Nationally, the American Association of Engineering Societies reports that 2,000 college teaching jobs are going begging. Obsolete equipment is one reason. Some measuring instruments at Texas A. & M. are so old, says Engineering Dean Robert Page, that alumni recognize them when visiting sons and daughters now enrolled at the school. Faculty members are chosen from the pool of engineering Ph.D.s, and the pool is dwindling. In 1972 U.S. universities awarded 3,774 engineering Ph.D.s, as against 2,751 this year. More than a third of those went to foreign nationals, who are likely to take their skills back home after graduation.

The shortage of teachers and Ph.D.s comes at a time when society is dependent as never before upon engineers to devise energy-saving designs in such areas as solar energy and synthetic fuels. "All the scientific information about solar energy is known," says Dean Charles Sanders of California State University-Northridge. "Fusion is scientifically understood. But you need engineers to build these things." The shortage of both engineering Ph.D.s and expert faculty arises from a booming industrial technology that has created a record demand for young engineers and pushed undergraduate enrollments in the field to an all-time high of 340,488. Today an average chemical, electrical or petroleum engineer with a brand new bachelor's degree can easily begin working at a salary of $22,000 annually. Some start as high as $27,000. Such salaries lead new engineers to view graduate schools as an unnecessary expense. Mark Gorski, 24, a 1980 B.S. in mechanical engineering from Tulane, had five job offers before deciding to join San Francisco's Bechtel Power Corp. to pursue his special interest in power plant design. If you go on to grad school, he says, "you lose two years' salary that you can never make up."

Many corporate recruiters say they cannot hire all the engineers they need, even at the B.S. level. A study by the California Society of Professional Engineers reports that Hughes Aircraft is short 2,000 engineers, while Hewlett-Packard needs some 2,500. In Massachusetts, where scores of technological companies cluster along Route 128 outside Boston, 41% of the jobs available in high-tech firms went unfilled last year.

A study just released by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation predicts that there will be an ample supply of baccalaureate engineers by 1990 -- except in the fast-growing computer field. The shortage of engineering Ph.D.s, though, seems more crucial and enduring. Says James Stevenson, acting vice president at Georgia Institute of Technology: "Any B.S. graduate can be a computer programmer. But it takes a Ph.D. to develop a more efficient computer language. It was Ph.D.s who developed the instrumentation systems for satellites. The work in genetic engineering is only done at top-flight graduate institutions by Ph.D.s." The American Society for Engineering Education warns that the loss of potential graduate students to high-paying jobs is almost at the point "where we may literally be 'eating our seed corn.' " Engineering educators see a solution in closer ties between industry and academe. The Boeing Co. has endowed a junior faculty chair at M.I.T. At New York's Grumman Aerospace Corp., Vice President Thomas Kelly says, "If we get a job inquiry from a professor, we'll call the dean of his school and say, 'Hey, do you know that so and so is unhappy?' We don't want to choke off the source of supply of engineering graduates." In many cases, too, companies are donating equipment and funds for academic engineering research. Westinghouse has earmarked $1 million for a new Robotics Institute based at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University.

Many engineering educators bewail the funding policy of the National Science Foundation, which channels four times as much money to "pure" science as to the work of engineers. As Daniel Greenberg, Washington publisher of Science and Government Report, puts it, "Scientists usually feel that engineering is sort of grubby stuff." But it may seem a good deal less grubby as society's dependence on engineers increases.

-- By Kenneth M. Pierce

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