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Bridging Engineering’s Minority Gap

February 15, 2008

This is a great article over at BusinessWeek.com:

Encouraging more women, African Americans, Latinos, and people with disabilities to pursue math and science makes good business sense…

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Of particular note is John E. Kelly’s mention of the shortage of engineering talent we are facing here in the United States:

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A LOOMING SHORTAGE
Why should this worry the private sector? Because engineering talent doesn’t come in one ethnicity, color, gender, or physical attribute. Cultivating more technical talent across the board just makes plain, good business sense. The number of retiring workers from science and engineering will mushroom over the next 20 years, aggravating an existing shortfall of technical skills that has already left 1.3 million engineering jobs vacant.

By 2010, the U.S. will need 20% more engineers, yet the growth rate in the number of engineering, math, and science graduates is expected to be about 2%.

There is no better time than Engineers Week and Presidents Day to look to our future—to those we currently refer to as “minorities.” By 2050, 85% of workforce entrants are expected to be people of color and women. And, says the National Science Foundation, minorities are expected to make up more than half of the resident college-age population of the U.S. by 2050, up from 34% in 1999. Today’s minorities are tomorrow’s majorities.

So what to do? For one thing, we ought to think like engineers and apply a healthy dose of persistence and creativity to solve the challenge.

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Written by bradley · Filed Under Engineering News 

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