Posted on 11/30/2005 4:17:44 PM PST by indthkr
Ted Rappaport came to Austin just a few years ago to set up a wireless-technology center at the University of Texas at Austin. The Wireless Networking and Communications Group, which Rappaport directs, has attracted a dozen corporate sponsors and 14 world-class faculty to the wireless center. It is a huge success story.
But there are two problems, and they are related.
The wireless group has 70 students — all but five of them graduate students. Nearly all of them are from China, India and other non-U.S. countries. They gain entry by attaining essentially perfect scores on the graduate record exams.
The first problem is that the vast majority of these students now want to go home, either immediately after earning their graduate degrees or after getting a few years of work experience. And the problem is not confined to the University of Texas at Austin. Rappaport went to the University of Florida not too long ago to give an invited lecture on wireless technology. He asked the Chinese students there how many of them planned to go home right after earning their graduate degrees. About two-thirds raised their hands. He then rephrased the question, asking how many would want to go home after working in the United States for a few years. All of them raised their hands.
Going home wasn't a very attractive option a decade or two ago, when all the good jobs were in America. Now, there are plenty of good jobs back home.
There's nothing wrong with going home. As the cliché reminds us, that's where the heart is. Most people ultimately feel most comfortable on their own turf, with their own culture, living near family, speaking their native language. But America's success has been about having so much to offer that turning one's back on the comforts of home becomes an acceptable trade-off.
The second, related problem is that so few U.S.-born students are gaining entry to U.S. engineering graduate schools. Some universities, such as Rice in Houston, are establishing scholarships targeted to American citizens. Some American-born engineering grad students say they feel isolated, with few friends to talk to in the cafeteria. How ironic is that?
We want bright foreign students — lots of them — to come to America. We want Them to become Us. But if U.S. taxpayers are going to spend their tax dollars to set up wireless-technology centers, they have a right to expect a reasonable share of the benefits. We need to keep more of those bright, foreign-born engineers in America, working here, starting companies here, putting down roots here.
And there are plenty of jobs to fill, especially in the wireless sector. Motorola intends to hire 250 people by the end of 2006 for its Austin Center of Excellence. Those research jobs are aimed at developing Motorola's 4G technology, including Linux and Java software. Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and other large companies are establishing or growing their own wireless centers in Austin. Freescale Semiconductor is hiring, selectively, for its wireless operations.
Alereon, an ultrawideband startup with about 80 employees, has a dozen job openings for UWB RF engineers and digital-ASIC and baseband designers. PropheSI, a startup focused on power amplifiers for cellular basestations, has its own list of job openings, which CEO Graham Haddock said are increasingly hard to fill.
Texas has succeeded in attracting premier wireless scholars such as Rappaport, succeeded in attracting some of the smartest students in the world to the Austin campus' wireless-communications group, succeeded in creating job openings at companies large and small. The academic, corporate and political leadership should be commended for creating such momentum.
The next phase should be to balance the student body better, so that women from the suburbs or Hispanic students from the Rio Grande Valley, for example, feel welcome. U.S. students should be sought after and granted scholarships. We need affirmative action, of sorts, at the engineering schools of our great universities.
Meanwhile, American companies must attract foreign graduate students and quickly bring them into decision-making roles — a different form of affirmative action. The human resources managers at most U.S. corporations need retraining in how to make non-U.S.-born employees feel like they are on track to better jobs.
Without these adjustments, we may be left with a major mismatch: spending tax dollars on graduate programs to train engineers who go home to Shanghai or Bangalore to work, leaving U.S.-based companies searching for the engineers they need to compete.
Hopefully this will result in those of us who are already here being in more demand
How about susidized tuition for American engineering students?
As outsourcing has shown, a high tech knowledge base is easy to lose and takes years to rebuild.
Half the problem is American students dont want to be engineers "its to hard and the payoff is too low"
My brother in-law is a tech professor at a West Coast state university. He says that it is extremely rare for them to get a Grad School application from a US citizen. He says, any US cititzen who applied would be accepted as long they met the basic requirements.
I spent a lot of time in Shanghai with a large American technology company's Asia Pacific operations.
These days in Shanghai, there are a LOT of job hopping for engineers with the right skills. Used to be for the Chinese university graduates a job with a large foreign multi-national was one of the most desirable career path and no one ever left after landing a gig at a MNC ... Not anymore, now we see talented engineers come and go at a drop of a hat for better money and hotter products, and a chance at IPO riches. It's getting to be like Silicon Valley in the 80's and 90's.
Without these adjustments, we may be left with a major mismatch: spending tax dollars on graduate programs to train engineers who go home to Shanghai or Bangalore to work, leaving U.S.-based companies searching for the engineers they need to compete.
I worked on a graduate degree in engineering during the early 1980's. The classes were filled with Iranians who made up about two-thirds of the class. The Iranians stuck to themselves, did group homework, and avoided Americans. I don't think acculturating communist Chinese is going to work. The entrepreneurial Chinese are not sponsored by the communists.
The really big fright America will awaken to is the lack of Americans interested in engineering. My town sends 95 percent of its high school students on to college. I have yet to hear about any of them going on to engineering schools. America can forget about it's future without the technological edge. It needs engineers to keep that edge.
You did it.
Good post.
We have a number of Chinese people working in our environment who thrive because the rest of us are willing (or required) to endure their very very very poor accents and presentation skills.
As long as they get the math right noone is willing to pipe up and say anything.
It makes for inefficiency and occasional misunderstandings leading to mistakes. But that's the cost of PC nonsense!
Yep! Any and all comers that meet basic requirements.
The author completely misreads why Americans aren't going to graduate school in engineering. A couple of decades ago engineers used got a comfortable middle class salary. Then with the flood of foreigners into American graduate schools, eager to work for peanuts in order to stay here, coupled with the vastly expanded H-1B program, the pay and status of engineering jobs plummeted. American kids were astute enough to see what was going on, and any of them with the smarts to be a good engineer went into law, medicine, real estate, business, etc.. Now we don't have a base of loyal American technical workers of all kinds. It will take a while before the damage will be repaired, if ever.
And it certainly didn't help to have The National Science Foundation publish a
"we gonna' run out of scientists" article in the late 1980s that turned out
to be bogus.
American student are smart enough to know when employers are just
trying to enlarge a pool and get workers for cheap, cheaper and cheapest.
Not every one of those guys from over there are ten feet tall.
"GRE test cancellation: No legal action yet against guilty students," by Kanchana Suggu in Mumbai
http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/oct/04gre.htm
Also many other sources, for example
http://www.ethics.org/resources/article_detail.cfm?ID=826
"Academic Integrity and the Graduate Record Exam," by Allison Pendell-Jones Ethics Resource Center
Am I mean-spirited for mentioning cheating over there? I am not saying that everyone cheats. But from what I have read the attitude toward cheating is surprising -- except I do remember pre-PC TV news (1950s) when student rioting occurred because universities tried to prevent cheating on finals. Also, I'm tired of hearing that "they" are ten feet tall and our young people are not. Too general.
1. One of the biggest reasons why Americans have shied away from graduate programs in engineering is that we tend to be very uncomfortable with a degree that is so specialized. Most people who get a master's degree in engineering do so after getting an undergraduate degree in the same field, and having this combination of degrees requires a very narrow focus.
2. For all the concerns about job instability and outsourcing in engineering, a career in this field is generally far more lucrative at the lower levels than most others. Engineering is one of the few fields where average entry-level workers do very well right out of an undergraduate program. A lot of young American engineers don't go to graduate school simply because they are paid very well right out of school, and by the time they reach a point where their education presents a "glass ceiling" for them they are more interested in pursuing different career tracks within the field (a managerial track, for example -- which doesn't require an advanced engineering degree).
3. I would strongly urge any young engineer to steer clear of any full-time graduate program in engineering. If you want to get an advanced degree, do it at night on a part-time basis while you work a full-time job in the field. The experience you get on the job is worth far more than the education you get in the classroom, and delaying the start of your career by enrolling in a full-time graduate program could very well set you back several years.
4. Because of the universal nature of engineering principles, engineering has basically become "commoditized" to the same extent that manual labor has. From a purely technical standpoint an engineer in the U.S. is generally no more competent than an engineer in China or India, so for a truly rewarding career in engineering it is necessary to acquire skills above and beyond the normal technical skills in your field. This means expanding your horizons into areas at the periphery of engineering, or even completely outside it. A law degree makes an engineer ideal for a highly lucrative career in patent law, an MBA makes an engineer an ideal manager in a high-tech company, a combination of engineering and finance makes for a perfect Wall Street analyst, etc. Even an advanced degree in English can serve an engineer well, since people with good technical writing skills can command some extraordinary salaries.
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