Obama: 'We Don't Have Enough Engineers' 651
dcblogs writes "President Obama wants to boost engineering graduation rates by 10,000 a year. In 2009, the US produced 126,194 engineering graduates for bachelor's and master's degrees and for Ph.D.s. The US had just over 1.9 million engineers in 2010. The unemployment rate in 2010 for all engineers was 4.5%. 'We've made incredible progress on education, helping students to finance their college educations, but we still don't have enough engineers,' said Obama. He's counting on the private sector to help expand the number of graduates."
But... Math is too hard (Score:2, Informative)
Well that's the comments I've heard from a lot of prospective Enginners. so, they take the easy way out and do Media or Business Studies.
Yes the Science stuff can be hard. So? Life can be hard!
Some points:-
-Schools are more concerned with getting everone to pass regardless of quality.
-Teaching Engineering at all costs a heck of a lot more than Accountancy or Law or some other 'soft' subject.
To be a successful Engineer takes a lot of dedication. It took me 7 years after leaving school to get my BS in Control Engineering.
Lockheed-Martin lays off 1200 Engineers... (Score:3, Informative)
...says the headlines just today [cnn.com]. I guess that means we only need 8800 more engineers this year!
Re:Solution (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree. Many managers don't get where they are by being complete idiots, it's just that they have a completely different way of seeing things, and it's all about short-term results.
So hiring people in 3rd-world countries is very attractive, because on the balance books it looks really good: they can say, "I saved the company $X million dollars per year by outsourcing [division]!" and then they get a $X/10 bonus, which they can buy themselves a giant mansion or a new yacht with. The inefficiency that plagues this deal and causes loss instead of gain takes a little while to show up and is harder to quantify, so by the time they figure out this was a bad deal, that manager has already "left the company to pursue other opportunities" and is relaxing on his yacht with three girlfriends.