I could take issue with some of these arguments. But I'm upmodding you anyway because your comment is an order of magnitude more sensible than the original article.
I used to work in the fabs of the former Hewlett-Packard, all but one of which have now been outsourced to Malaysia and Singapore. It happened to the fab I worked in -- just after 9/11 we were told that our factory would be closed in a year and that most of the local workers would be laid off. It was a profoundly depressing experience -- like the opposite of working at a startup. I was working at a shutdown.
Every time a factory closes and lays off, say, five hundred people, that's five hundred families -- and their friends, and their relations -- who learn the lesson: Technically skilled people live in fear of being laid off.
It's pretty hard to get someone excited about mechanical engineering when every automotive engineer and machinist she knows is living the life of a frightened rabbit.
> Technically skilled people live in fear of being laid off.
I don't know. The folks I know without a solid education of some sort live in much more fear of losing their jobs than I do. And with good reason it would seem. Most of them go through 2-3 jobs a year.
The problem with losing a job in high-end American manufacturing [1] is that you often cannot get another such job without, at the very least, moving your family across the country. There used to be half a dozen HP fabs in California. I believe there may still be one of them left, but I'm not even sure of that.
And, mind you, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'd certainly rather be an unemployed engineer than a fully employed minimum-wage day laborer. And, if that were the choice, engineering schools would all be full of people. But what we're trying to explain is why young people choose to pursue legal or medical [2] or business education instead of engineering. That's not necessarily a rational choice. Young people make that choice based on cultural cues. And the culture of U.S. manufacturing has been gloomy for years, not without reason -- the overvalued dollar was a disaster for domestic manufacturing.
[1] As opposed to sweatshop manufacturing, which I know nothing about. For all I know there's plenty of work as sweated labor. But that doesn't exactly encourage folks to go out and get those advanced degrees.
[2] Here it's worth noting that, thanks to their effective political organization, doctors and lawyers have licensing requirements that protect them from foreign competition. That's why everyone's free to talk about outsourcing medical tasks to India over the network, but nobody ever talks about the obvious possibility of importing Indian doctors to serve in roles -- like primary care -- that are suffering from shortages in the USA. For some reason that H1B-visa solution is only ever applied to engineers... do you think that people choosing college majors (and their parents) don't notice that and draw conclusions from it?
Now, I don't think this is as big a problem, in reality, as I just made it sound. Engineering is a much safer career than people think, and medicine and law are much more tedious and problematic than people realize. But that's not reflected in the relative reputations of the fields.
> I'd certainly rather be an unemployed engineer than a fully employed minimum-wage day laborer. And, if that were the choice, engineering schools would all be full of people. But what we're trying to explain is why young people choose to pursue legal or medical [2] or business education instead of engineering.
You've hit on a truly glaring omission from almost every hand wringing article about the dearth of US citizens in graduate science and engineering programs. It happens over and over (an interview with the Dean of the engineering school at Princeton comes to mind, but these articles appear once every month or two in a major publication).
As you've pointed out, they compare the salaries and working conditions for engineers with graduate degrees against a national average for all workers, and then wonder why the best and brightest Americans aren't lining up for graduate degrees in the Engineering school. But I have never, not even once, seen the author of one of these articles ask they question you just posed: why would a young person choose to pursue a PhD in computer science or mechanical engineering instead of getting an MBA and shooting for investment banking, getting a JD with an eye toward patent law, or getting an MD and applying to cardiology residencies? These programs certainly have demanding admissions requirements and turn a lot of people away, but nobody seems to lament a lack of interest among young Americans in these fields.
So why these and not engineering? There may indeed be some wonderful reasons to choose engineering or science, but this is the question that would lead to real, honest discussion instead of this "engineering is so wonderful, we just need to make it cool crap".
Why don't engineering deans talk honestly about the problem? Well, partly because no (e.g.) aerospace engineering professor is crazy enough to stand up and say "The reason nobody wants to major in my field is that aerospace engineering has been in near-stasis for decades. Very few new civilian aircraft are being designed or built, especially in the USA, and military and NASA designs are judged less by their airworthiness and more by their ability to generously disburse taxpayer dollars to contractors in all fifty states." [1]
Nobody gets tenure by saying things like that.
Obviously engineering professors could help to improve working conditions for their graduates, if they know how. Many of them don't, though. You don't necessarily learn how to run a successful engineering business by teaching engineering in school.
But a big reason is that deans have little real incentive to change the system. The number of undergraduate majors in a major-university engineering department is poorly correlated with its reputation or its wealth. The real money in academic engineering departments is in research grants, and undergrads are a net hindrance to research. You need a lot of talented grad students, but it doesn't really matter if they're all from overseas.
The folks who are in pain from lack of domestically-trained undergraduate engineers are the companies trying to hire them in the USA, not the universities. A college would rather have you pay full tuition to major in English than in EE. Teaching English is one hell of a lot cheaper, because adjunct English professors are desperate to eat.
[1] Note: Argument exaggerated for effect. Author actually has no idea what aerospace engineering is like these days.
Yeah, those are definitely reasons why they don't. But part of me would hope that a scientist's zeal for objectivity would compel them to address this question honestly.
By the way, a professor name William Zumeta wrote a very good paper on this subject.
I used to work in the fabs of the former Hewlett-Packard, all but one of which have now been outsourced to Malaysia and Singapore. It happened to the fab I worked in -- just after 9/11 we were told that our factory would be closed in a year and that most of the local workers would be laid off. It was a profoundly depressing experience -- like the opposite of working at a startup. I was working at a shutdown.
Every time a factory closes and lays off, say, five hundred people, that's five hundred families -- and their friends, and their relations -- who learn the lesson: Technically skilled people live in fear of being laid off.
It's pretty hard to get someone excited about mechanical engineering when every automotive engineer and machinist she knows is living the life of a frightened rabbit.