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My neighbour has been complaining since 2022 about not being able to hire enough qualified engineeers for the contracts he takes on. He said it’s not like you can snap your fingers and find engineers if they haven’t gone to school for it, and he knows it will take 4-6 years for a new crop to go to school and become qualified. He blames it on young men (correctly) not wanting to be told in universities, where people must go to learn to become engineers, that they’re evil, worthless and privileged and should loathe themselves. He’s resorted to hiring foreign workers for this reason. I don’t know if the US is experiencing the same problem, but it’s very real here.

Good point regarding today’s “higher” education entities. And they’re pretty much all woke these days.

I long for the days of the purely vocational education, training all comers that will stay, in the ways of whatever profession they’re teaching, be it engineering, or the trades or crafts - for a respectably small tuition. Because the hatred expressed towards white males in our colleges (unless they’re sports stars) is highly discouraging.

I endured it for 3 semesters in the mid 90s before I switched to a more reasonable school where diversity didn’t quite mean bashing the productive. Of course, that’s since changed.

:: young men (correctly) not wanting to be told in universities, where people must go to learn to become engineers, that they’re evil, worthless and privileged and should loathe themselves. ::

THIS!
Only thing you forgot was to insert the descriptors, “white” and Christian” before “men”.
To wit: “young, WHITE, CHRISTIAN men (correctly) not wanting to be told in universities, where people must go to learn to become engineers, that they’re evil, worthless and privileged and should loathe themselves.
Courtesy of CRT and DEI in the education system
Demolish the US DoEd.

Your neighbor is almost correct in his judgement as to why he can’t get all he “engineers” he’d like. And when he, and many others, say “engineer” that’s generally not quite what they mean. In the last three, or so, decades “engineer” has gotten to mean geeks, keyboard cowboys, code writers, data processors, etc.

But “engineer” is a real thing and there aren’t many of us. to wit: I’m the only one from my high school class of @100. In my ball playing years no one, not one, other person was in a class I was taking. In my University of 6,000+ students the engineering college was just 350 together in all engineering branches. That’s about 5%.
In my old industrial organization of something over 6,500 people fewer than 100 were graduate engineers and only a dozen of them were doing actual engineering type work.

As a registered professional engineer I’m one of about a hundred in a state of over one million people.

Asking for engineers but not having appropriate work for them is a major downer in the “help wanted” market. Sometimes it’s a vanity thing on the part of the boss. It takes serious leg work to visit the places that produce engineers. You can’t find them with a cute web page. By definition engineers are builders, of one thing or another, and employers have to show them they have something productive for them to work at.

And I really doubt that the East Indians produce a higher % of actual engineers than anyone else does. With over a billion of them there are no doubt more folks trying to avoid starvation. That’s the pool that the Swammi and Dutch have been able to hire from.

And Trump has it right. They should not be hired to replace otherwise qualified Americans. By the same token, truly qualified Americans should have zero problem signing on someplace else.

An actual graduate engineer will have zero problems finding his first job. A big bizness recruiter will be there with a plane ticket and a moving voucher. Your neighbor needs to fire up his bus and make the rounds of engineering colleges if he truly needs that kind of help. And you said “contracts.” If your neighbor can’t guarantee some sort of stability he has a long road to hoe.