[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

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.

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.

[MarkL]

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.

And it doesn't help when these "financial 'rocket scientists'" like Carly Fiorina and the rest of so totally wrecked some of the greatest sources of technology that the US (or the world, for that matter) has ever seen, like HP and Lucent (formerly Bell Labs)

Mark