Help Wanted: Engineers

By John S. DeMott

The boom-and-bust profession is once again booming

While the Reagan Administration and congressional leaders are worrying about rapidly rising unemployment, the job picture in at least one area of the economy is bright: engineering. At commencement exercises this month and next, up to 65,000 men and women will receive bachelor's degrees in engineering from about 280 institutions. Perhaps 80% of them will go to work almost immediately at starting salaries ranging from $21,000 to $30,000 and, in a few cases, even up to $40,000. They will be able to choose among multiple job offers from U.S. corporations large and small. Says Herbert Stein, head of the systems engineering department at the University of Illinois: "Most engineers are in demand regardless of their specialty."

At the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, perhaps the best engineering school in the U.S., a pack of recruiters from 169 companies pounced on 147 graduates this past winter. They regard each recruit from Caltech as a "capture," in the jargon of the business, to be treasured and pampered. Kenneth Sieck, 22, has talked with 20 aerospace company recruiters and has taken six plant tours, including a visit to an IBM facility in Tucson, complete with rental car, dinner and lunches. At Northrop Aircraft, company officials proudly showed him their latest equipment.

Some experts, though, are starting to warn that a paucity of engineers may hold back American economic and technological development. High-tech companies in the Sunbelt and the Northeast seem most concerned. Says William Howard, a vice president of Motorola who is based in Arizona: "The shortage has slowed down our progress, slowed down our development of new processes and slowed down our ability to do maintenance. The net effect is to put things on hold or do them more slowly until we can recruit the talent." A study prepared for California Governor Jerry Brown Jr. showed that the state's electronics industry will create jobs for 62,000 electrical and computer scientists during the next five years, but the state's universities will turn out only 14,000 students capable of filling those jobs.

Engineering has long been in a boom-and-bust cycle. In the late 1950s, after the first Sputnik was launched, it was a hot field. Then in the early 1970s, with the winding down of the Project Apollo space program and the Viet Nam War, and the cancellation of projects to build an American supersonic commercial airplane, engineers had a tough time finding work. Now glamorous new computer technologies as well as advances in other fields of applied science have made the profession popular once again.

There is testament to this in many newspapers. Every Sunday, for example, the Los Angeles Times has two full sections of advertisements for engineers that have been placed by some of the biggest names in U.S. business. Rockwell International claims to "meet the challenge head on." Convair pleads: "Hang on. Convair's coming to town." Says Douglas Boswell, a West Coast engineer recruiter: "When the right electrical engineer comes along, I can get him five interviews in a single day."

The recession has naturally had an effect. It has cut into the number of offers some graduates receive, from the usual five or six to perhaps two or three, and skittishness over the economy caused some June grads to snap up jobs hastily in January or February. But even General Motors and Ford in Detroit's hard-hit auto industry are hiring engineers from the University of Michigan's College of Engineering at salaries ranging from $24,000 to $28,000 a year.

Never before have so many students flocked to engineering schools to endure the blistering rigors of basic classes in calculus, physics, chemistry and the advanced courses that follow. That road, which leads to such sets of postsurname initials as B.S.E.E. (bachelor of science in electrical engineering) and B.S.M.E. (bachelor of science in mechanical engineering), is academically rougher by most accounts than almost anything else offered in the U.S. educational establishment.

Even older engineers who become disillusioned with their profession in mid-career look back upon their school days with pride. Says Thomas Morris-White, 44, an engineering manager with Bechtel: "If I had it to do all over again, I'd be an engineer or a doctor. I wouldn't consider anything else."

There is the expected rush of applicants to the top-level schools, such as Caltech, M.I.T., Rensselaer, Cornell and Michigan. At Caltech, 1,665 applicants sought 215 seats for the fall 1982 term. Other, less competitive engineering schools also have far more applicants than classroom spaces. Among those are the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Texas A&M (the largest engineering school in the U.S., with 1,500 graduates yearly) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (see box).

With so many applicants, most of the schools can afford to be choosy, even with the Reagan Administration's threats to eliminate or reduce student-aid programs. More than enough students can pay their way with combinations of loans, parental help or part-time jobs. That is true even though tuition and other expenses for a typical school year have risen to $11,700 at M.I.T. or $9,100 for nonresident students at state universities like Michigan. Scholastic Aptitude Test math scores for successful candidates at the more competitive schools hover at lofty averages: 760 and 687 out of 800 at Caltech and Rensselaer, respectively, which put those candidates in the top percentiles of all who take the tests.

Once they earn their degrees and enter the labor force, engineers know that they are in a field with low levels of joblessness, even during the worst of times. Unemployment among certain kinds of engineers does exist, though. There appears to be developing a small surplus of chemical engineers, for example, who have been hurt by the Reagan Administration's lower priority for environmental regulations. Here and there throughout the profession, there are blotches of joblessness in the pool of 1.3 million American engineers. But overall, estimates Patrick Sheridan of the Engineering Manpower Commission, engineer unemployment is no more than 1%, vs. 9% for the work force as a whole. Joblessness in old industrial centers like Buffalo can go 12% and higher.

Sheridan and some other employment experts in the field say that the engineer supply is about in balance with the demand. James McNeely, director of placement services at Virginia Polytechnic, believes that there is no general engineer shortage, just a narrow one in some of the specialties, including computer technology and robotics.

Many older engineers, who decided upon their professions before the Sputnik rush, view with skepticism any talk of an engineer shortage. They see this as an attempt, indeed almost a conspiracy, by the engineering colleges and the big employing companies to increase the supply of engineers and thus hold down salaries. One of them is James V. Ball, 45, B.S.E.E. (University of Michigan, '64), who has a master's degree in engineering management (Northeastern, '68). He is now a systems manager in Sunnyvale, Calif. Says Ball: "There is no engineer shortage. If salaries were raised, whatever 'shortages' there are would vanish overnight."

Experienced engineers complain that their wages start flattening out at about age 35 and that many of them are forced to go into management to earn more. Electronic Engineering Times, an industry magazine, reported that the average salaries of electronic and electrical engineers rose from $31,134 last year to $33,343 this year. That is not much above the starting salaries of hot, new engineering graduates.

The seeming shortage of some kinds of engineers may be caused by high-technology companies openly stockpiling the skilled workers so they will have them on hand when the economy turns up. Says John Swain, Phoenix manager of college recruiting for Intel, the computer-chip manufacturer: "The tendency is to hire rather than not to hire, even if you don't have an immediate need." This policy is straining engineering schools because the salaries are luring away students at the bachelor's degree level and discouraging them from going into teaching with higher-level degrees.

Several companies in need of engineers have started programs to help universities that train them. This week Motorola will announce a plan to donate $1.2 million to an Arizona State University engineering program. Exxon and Ford are also pumping money into engineering departments.

Corporations realize that engineers are the advance forces in the global battle for markets, and other countries are paying great attention to training these skilled workers. Japan turns out about 40% more engineers than does the U.S. A standard joke in American boardrooms is that when Washington passed a slew of environmental regulations, Detroit's automakers hired 200 more lawyers but Japan hired 200 more engineers. U.S. firms now seem to realize that they could use fewer lawyers and more engineers. --By John S. DeMott

Reported by Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles and Bonnie Bartak/ Phoenix

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles, Bonnie Bartak/Phoenix

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