02 July 2004

"Would you recommend an engineering degree to your child?"

Forrest M. Mims III

In a recent editorial, Christina Nickolas, editor of Electronic Products, asked, "Would you recommend an EE [Electrical Engineering] degree to your child?" (Electronic Products, May 2004). She then expressed her concern about the outsourcing of electronics jobs to other countries, perhaps even to engineers who received their training in the United States.

There is another angle to the question raised by Nickolas.

Some of us who work or have worked in science and technology were involved in science fairs back in high school.

Back then, many students did projects in physics and electronics. My senior project was a simple hybrid analog-digital computer that translated 20 words of Russian into English. Today projects like this have become a rarity. So have electronics hobbyists, who once bought millions of books at Radio Shack. A few years ago the market declined to a point where Radio Shack stopped selling books.

Several years ago I gave a talk at a major university. The professor who extended the invitation privately expressed serious concerns about the sharp decline in the enrollment in EE by U.S. citizens. He predicted there would soon come a time when all the EE students would be from other countries. Ironically, the professor himself was from India.

There is a loud message here, particularly since the results of science and mathematics assessment tests in the United States continue to show a nation in scholastic decline. The question goes far beyond the outsourcing problem, for many offshore engineers received their training in the U.S. What do we expect when our own culture dumbs itself down while our major universities continue to train thousands of foreign students to become world class engineers?

Yes, outsourcing is a major problem. But it is a problem that we and our culture have created. The problem seems to be accelerating in a positive feedback fashion, too. Unfortunately, so many of our EE programs have become so exclusively devoted to digital technology that it is possible recent graduates might never have heard the phrase "positive feedback," so let me summarize with this:

The United States has a choice: We can completely reassess and rebuild our educational systems, methods and goals. Or we can continue our present policies and recognize that our vaunted scientific and technological leadership will eventually follow the same downward trend of the test scores that clearly show where the next generation is heading.

The Society for Amateur Scientist is working to address this problem through the LABRats program. Click here for details about you can help.