Engineering Crisis or Not?

Boy, did my post last Saturday about US students not going into engineering strike a nerve. Between my site, Digg and other sites, there were nearly 700 Diggs and over 200 comments posted in two days putting it as one of the top 100 Digg articles worldwide over the weekend. There were over 12,000 pages views from 1,200 different cities around the world to my site. For this kind of activity to take place on a weekend tells me that this topic is sitting on a lot of people's minds. The core question being discussed across all was whether we have a crisis in the US or not.

Some argued that while China, India and others may have larger absolute numbers, their engineers are not nearly as innovative as their US counter-parts and hence not as productive. Even if this is true, I would argue that it is very dangerous to assume that it will remain so. We used to assume that the Chinese entrepreneurs would be content with knocking off American products are a fraction of the original price. That came to an end in past couple of years. We are now seeing silicon coming out of Chinese fabs, designed and made by Chinese engineers, that is significantly faster than its counter parts in Silicon Valley.

I still focus on the 5% number. Only 5% of our students chose to go into engineering. I believe that the arts, languages, finance and other liberal arts subjects are essential to the quality of our life, our advancement and our culture.  However, cold, hard science drives much of productivity and industrial innovation. The Industrial Revolution, Computer Revolution, etc were driven by scientists. I would simply be more comfortable knowing that we weren't relying on 1 out of 20 students to carry this torch. I don't know what the right number is, but I'd certainly like to see it north of 15 or 20% (still only 1 in 5 or 1 in 6).

This weekend, while we were out, the police came to our house and had to chase away a stray, mangy coyote that had wandered into our yard and was stalking our dog. Our dog, Beau, is a pound dog, is half border collie and terrorizes unsuspecting lawn guys coming into our backyard. In short, Beau can take care of himself and is about 50% larger than the coyote above. That said, the police commented this coyote has killed bigger dogs than Beau in the neighborhood and would likely do so to our dog if we were not careful. Their comment was: "Beau is feed everyday and the coyote needs to win to get food." In short, be wary of competitors that are hungrier and more impoverished than you as they have less to lose and an imperative to win. And, 5% is way too low for my liking...