AAES SAYS SHORT-TERM FIX USING H1-B VISA EXPANSION WILL NOT ADDRESS LONG-TERM PROBLEM
(WASHINGTON) -- September 28, 1998 -- "With Congress and the White House poised to enact a new law expanding the number of H1-B visas granted over the next 3 years, the bill will achieve little with respect to the fundamental problem of attracting enough young people to pursue careers in engineering," says American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES) Chair Martha Sloan. Sloan, a professor of electrical engineering at Michigan Technological University, is the first woman to be elected chair of the AAES, a multi-disciplinary organization of engineering societies whose membership represents more than one million engineers in the United States.
According to the AAES Engineering Workforce Commission (EWC), the number of undergraduates receiving engineering degrees in the United States has declined by nearly 15 percent over the last decade. In Michigan, the home of Sloan and Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-MI), who has been the Senate's chief proponent for expanding the H1-B visa program, the number of undergraduates receiving engineering degrees has fallen by more than seven-and-a-half percent over the same period of time.
Speaking to a Harris Poll commissioned by AAES and released earlier this month, Sloan noted that the poll shows that the U.S. public feels uninformed about the engineering enterprise and betrays a startling lack of knowledge about engineers' involvement in key areas of American endeavor. The poll, American Perspectives on Engineers and Engineering, revealed that 45 percent of Americans feel that they are "not very well informed about engineering and engineers" while another 16 percent stated that they are "not at all well informed about engineering and engineers." Among women, however, the percentages increased to 55 percent and 23 percent, respectively.
"As our nation's workforce continues to transition from one that is predominantly male and Caucasian to one that will be majority female and minority, the price we pay in our society for engineers having worked in such obscurity may not be known for another generation," says Sloan. "But it is clear to me today that if we, as an engineering community, in partnership with the media, our educational system, and our nation's engineering employers, fail to act now to increase society's understanding of engineering, particularly among women and minorities, our nation's economic, environmental, and national security will be threatened. America simply cannot maintain its global leadership if we become overly dependent on the H1-B visa as a substitute for nurturing our own engineering talent."
Echoing Sloan, Gary Tooker, CEO of Motorola, proclaimed during last year's National Engineers Week, "The nations that lead the world in the decades to come will be those that encourage creative people to become engineers."
Delon Hampton, Chairman and CEO of Delon Hampton and Associates and President-Elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers, noted the danger associated with engineering being a 'stealth profession' in the United States. "Based on the latest EWC enrollment figures and the Harris Poll data, it seems that many Americans, especially women and minorities, don't consider engineering as a field where they can achieve to their maximum potential while utilizing their talents to serve society in the areas they most care about today -- the environment, public health and safety, a better quality of life," said Hampton. "We must do better at conveying that message if we're going to attract and maintain the qualified engineering workforce we need for our future prosperity."
Joseph Bordogna, president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, offered similar remarks upon seeing the Harris Poll results. "We can all agree that the true strength of society resides in its human capital -- and especially its engineering workforce," said Bordogna. "Greater diversification of the engineering workforce and increased technological literacy must be achieved if our nation is to maintain its global leadership in engineering. If we are to attract our best and brightest students to engineering careers, we must ensure that their concern for human compassion and environmental stewardship as well as their capacity for creating economic wealth is understood and respected by our citizens and institutions. Our ability to improve public understanding of engineering will not only raise the level of interest among our nation's youth in engineering, but elicit public support as well for the efforts of our engineers to simultaneously improve our world's economy and ecology in this post-industrial knowledge-based age we all share."
To address the challenges facing the profession with respect to public awareness and understanding, AAES has expanded its activities to include a new Engineering Alliance that will attempt to unify the engineering community -- industry, academia, government, and associations such as AAES -- around the primary goal of attracting more students to careers in engineering. According to Sloan, "The Engineering Alliance, to be launched at the end of the year, will be the forum for which all of us in the engineering community can tackle the problems of public awareness, technological literacy, and workforce preparedness and availability. As engineers create economic wealth, preserve national security, and improve the quality of life, we cannot afford to take for granted the importance of maintaining a vibrant engineering workforce here in the United States when other nations are increasingly dependent on retaining engineering talent in their homelands. If industry participates with half as much vigor in the Alliance as it did in lobbying for the H1-B expansion," Sloan says, "we should be able to offer employers a much better deal down the road."
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For more information on The Engineering Alliance or the AAES/Harris Poll, contact:
Name: Greg Schuckman, Director of Communications, Outreach, and Strategic Initiatives Phone: (202) 296-2237 ext. 207 (local); (888) 400-2237 ext. 207 (toll free) [email protected]
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