Interesting...

[Adam L. Beberg]

Oddness... Less and less engineers, yet the job market is still trash, which
attracts even less...

Women appear to be less and less interested in engineering, also no good,
despite rather active efforts to fix this... maybe because engineers have
no lives and get no respect?

An engineering requires math and science, which our K-12 schools dont teach,
so freshman cant hack it... OK that's no surprise, but the reaction is that
the colleges give up on the math and science, giving us stupider graduates,
which is what Qualcomm is actually bitching about in the first place.

I'd like to see how many of those 60k grads were not from the USA in the
first place...

-------------

"As We Lose Engineers, Who Will Take Us Into the Future?"
Wall Street Journal (06/07/02) P. B1; Begley, Sharon

Engineering and technology companies are worried about the prospect of fewer
engineers in the future. The number of engineering bachelor's degrees peaked
at 77,572 in 1985 but plummeted to 60,914 in 1998. Qualcomm VP Daniel
Sullivan says his company needs more experts in computer-aided design, radio
frequency, and very-large scale integration (VLSI) to continue research and
development in the digital wireless arena. Aerospace Corp. President William
F. Ballhaus says engineers are becoming increasingly scarce because many of
them have reached retirement age and are not being replaced. And despite the
promise of high starting salaries, many college students are discouraged by
the field's academic curriculums; especially women, who earned only 1.7
percent of engineering bachelor's degrees in 1998, down from 2.2 percent in
1985. The first two years of a program often consist solely of difficult
math and science courses. "No wonder we're losing 40 percent of the freshman
who start engineering," says William Wulf, head of the National Academy of
Engineering. However, ground-breaking programs at MIT, Tufts, Drexel,
Virginia Tech, and Stanford have earned accolades in regards to drawing
engineering undergraduates with more innovative approaches. Virginia Tech,
for example, allows engineering majors to take engineering classes during
the first two years of the curriculum, instead of just basic science and
math courses, in an effort to get students more interested in the field.