The room was abuzz with flickering gadgets and gossip laden with technology jargon, such as “infrared thermography” and “photovoltaic systems.”
Amid the crowd of professional engineers and college students flanking poster-board presentations at Union College's first annual Tech Valley Engineering Symposium, Mike Harty looked a bit out of place.
Harty stuck out not because he was one of only two high-school seniors presenting studies at the College Hall Park complex off Nott Street. Not because he wore a suit and tie while many of the Union engineering students were clad in T-shirts and sandals. The 18-year-old Columbia High School student on Tuesday presented one of the few studies at the symposium that was not exactly related to engineering.
Harty worked seven hours every day last summer with an Albany College of Pharmacy professor studying how two drugs, ursolic acid and Taxol, prevented blood clots that can cause heart attacks.
The East Greenbush student wanted to spend his summer researching something more related to his field of interest, chemical engineering, but he was unable to find a university professor willing to serve as a mentor for him. The drug testing was similar enough to chemical engineering to keep him happy. “I have no regrets. I loved everything I was doing,” said Harty.
But Harty's science research teacher, Cindy Taylor, wishes it were easier for her students to find engineering mentors. One of the reasons she believes so few of her students are interested in engineering is because their ability to get real world experience in the field is limited.
“In engineering, it's much harder to get anyone to talk to you. They think 'high school student' and don't want anything to do with you,” said Taylor.
The 20-year veteran teacher has seen interest in engineering wane, as only eight of her 38 advanced science students want to pursue careers in that field. The rest want to be medical doctors or researchers and can easily enroll in internships at Albany Medical Center.
“Maybe some kids don't like doing math. It's as simple as that,” said Brendan Johnson, a Columbia High School junior who wants to be a computer engineer. He was one of six students in Taylor's science class attending the engineering symposium.
However, engineering scholars and professionals say the fight to keep youths interested in their field starts long before high school. It is a struggle for tomorrow's brightest engineers and one that the United States appears to be losing on the global scale.
The National Science Board in April 2004 reported a “troubling decline ” in the number of U.S. citizens pursuing engineering and science careers. A month later the U.S. Department of Education said more than half of the country's high school seniors are not taking any science courses.
A year after the federal board raised the alarm about a pending engineering shortage, upstate New York industry representatives say they are not seeing widespread gaps in the science and technology work force.
“We don't have a problem in finding people to work here,” said James Healy, a spokesman for the General Electric Global Research Center in Niskayuna.
The GE research and development plant employs 1,400 technicians, scientists, researchers and engineers, with about half of them holding doctorates. Despite GE's ease in finding qualified engineers in a global pool of candidates, the potential work force shortage does have the company worried. “It's not something you ignore,” said Healy.
With more than half of the country's science and engineering degree holders 40 or older, gaps in the work force may expand greatly in about 15 years because of retirements. However, in the last 20 years, the country has gone from being the third-leading producer of natural science and engineering degrees to the 17 th in the world.
“That's a daunting statistic. If we don't wake up, we're going to be in big trouble,” said Union College Dean of Engineering and Computer Science Robert Balmer.
COMPETING COUNTRIES
Several Asian countries, including China, South Korea and Japan in 2001 produced almost double the amount of engineering degrees awarded in the United States. More engineering competition is coming from the European Union, non-U.S. G-7 countries, and non-U.S. Organization for Economic Corporation and Development nations, according to the National Science Board.
“Although the United States remains the world's leading [science and technology] leader, a collection of trends in indicators of U.S. S &T competitiveness paints a more different picture,” the NSB said in its Science and Engineering Indicators 2004 report.
In 2000, 2.8 million of the 7.8 million degrees awarded in the United States were in science and engineering fields, according to the NSB report.
At Union, 15 students graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. That is little more than half the 28 degrees issued in 1974 and is a far cry from the 85 awarded in 1984, a spike seen throughout the country in the 1980s. “Clearly, we need to motivate people into technology fields,” said Balmer.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union sent the world's first artificial satellite into space, launching a rush for engineering degrees in the United States. Balmer said he hopes the Capital Region's Tech Valley initiative will be able to produce a degree of engineering enthusiasm like that seen during the space race.
COURTING STUDENTS
One strategy Union and area technology companies have employed to cultivate future generations of engineers is to host science programs mostly geared toward elementary-school students.
On April 30, Union will bring 22 Capital Region schools to campus for the annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, where students will test machines they made designed to open soda bottles.
Looking to prevent elementary school students from being dissuaded from engineering pursuits, General Electric also hosts science programs for children. In November it will again bring about 400 Capital Region fourth graders to its Niskayuna plant.
“It's not to encourage more into [engineering fields]. It's to make sure the ones who are interested don't get dissuaded, because we need fresh talent,” said Ronald Bucinell, a Union mechanical engineering associate professor.
Bucinell challenged the assumption that the United States should be the world's leading producer of engineers. Emerging industrial nations, such as China, produce more engineers than the United States because they need more, he said.
“We don't need to produce more engineers. We need to produce good engineers,” Bucinell said. Nevertheless, he noted that the college's mechanical engineering department has doubled over the last four years to 180 students.
However, China also produces more engineers to be more competitive with technology markets in the United States. The drive to unseat the United States from its engineering pre-eminence is already apparent in the country's waning automotive industry, which is “squirming” under foreign pressure, said Balmer.
MORE NEEDED
And it will take a lot more than annual science fair programs to maintain the United States' leading role in technology fields, said Dan Gentile, executive director of the Capital Region Workforce Investment Board. Some European and Asian countries have adopted policies to become leaders in the global technology market and to produce more engineers.
“We don't have a policy that says we need engineers, so let's go out and create them. We have a hands-off policy,” said Gentile.
Despite the lack of federal and state policy supporting the production of engineers, the NSB said the United States has maintained its “scientific and technological edge” through decades of investment in research and development fields.
New York ranks second in college and university investments in research and development projects. The state's higher education institutes last year set a research and development investment record of $2.77 billion. That was an 11 percent increase from 2001's record investment of $2.48 billion, according to the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research.
Over 400,000 scientists and engineers live in New York. The state ranks second nationwide in producing electrical engineers and third in mechanical engineers, according to Empire State Development.
CALL FOR ACTION
Nevertheless, Gentile questions whether the Capital Region, even with all its technology colleges and universities, will be able to produce and maintain an adequate amount of engineers for the future.
“If action is not taken to change these trends,” the NSB said, “we could reach 2020 and find that the ability of U.S. research and education institutions to regenerate has been damaged and that their preeminence has been lost to other areas in the world.”
Gentile said neither New York nor the United States should adopt policies that steer young children into engineering fields. He emphasized the need “to do a very good job of telling them what their options are.”