Booting Up

TEXAS IS NOT GOING TO GET CAUGHT SHORT WHEN IT COMES TO ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS. TOP LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT, INDUSTRY AND ACADEMIA ARE WORKING TOGETHER TO ATTRACT MORE YOUNG PEOPLE TO THE FIELD.

AS A FRESHMAN electrical engineering student at the University of Texas-Pan American in 2002, Andres Lugo struggled. UT Pan Am is a commuter school with a large Hispanic population in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, and most students work off-campus jobs. Lugo was no exception. But the 20 hours a week he worked at Ticket-master greatly interfered with his studies. Then he joined a unique program at UT Pan Am that gives students part-time jobs in the electrical engineering department to keep them on campus and focused on the demanding curriculum. Lugo's grades improved. In his senior year, the faculty named him "Outstanding Student of the Year." He's now working for Raytheon and starting graduate school at the University of Texas at Dallas. The jobs program, he says, was key to his success. "I was able to keep school as my top priority," Lugo explains. Moreover, it allowed him to spend more time with other students and faculty, and that "helped me feel comfortable in that environment."

Lugo, 23, is just one of many success stories spawned by the UT Pan Am jobs program (see story, page 31). And it exists only because of an enterprising consortium comprising industry, academia and government that funds novel approaches to boost graduation rates in electrical engineering and computer science. The Texas Engineering and Technical Consortium (TETC) raises money from industry donations and federal government sources, and those dollars are then matched by the state legislature. TETC (commonly pronounced "T-tech") then awards Technology Workforce Development (TWD) grants as seed money to schools that come up with solid proposals for increasing graduation rates, mainly by improving recruitment or retention efforts.

The need to graduate more engineers is certainly acute. The number of jobs for engineers and computer scientists is expected to grow 36 percent through 2010 in the United States. But it will likely be tough to fill them. The number of undergraduate engineering degrees conferred in the United States peaked in 1985, and by 2004 the number had dwindled by 20 percent. In electrical engineering, undergraduate degrees peaked in 1987 at 25,000; last year it was half that amount. Enrollment for computer science degrees fell a whopping 60 percent from 2000 to 2004. Of the 1.1 million high school kids who took the ACT college entrance exam in 2005, only 5 percent planned to seek an engineering degree. Sadly, most of them won't finish. The national retention rate for freshman engineering students is 48 percent. Last year, America graduated more sports-exercise majors than electrical engineers. That unfortunate stat prompted General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to quip in a speech this year: "If you want to be the massage capital of the world, you're on your way."

If we can't meet our need for engineers in the future, it would undoubtedly be bad for the national economy. But it could particularly whack Texas, whose economy is strongly underpinned by the high-tech industry. Texas' technology industry, second only to California's, employs 446,000 people. That represents a $30.4 billion payroll. The industry accounts for 30 percent of the state's exports. Stats like those have earned Texas silicon-plated bragging rights. But the state's high-flying tech industry could find itself grounded if it can't recruit needed talent. So six years ago Texas vowed to double the annual number of engineering, computer science, math and physical science bachelor's degrees it awards to 36,000 by 2010.

An ambitious, worthy goal, to be sure. But how to accomplish it? That's when a group of high-tech companies, led by Texas Instruments, championed a recommendation from a government study and in 2001 persuaded state lawmakers to create TETC. Beyond its goal of increasing engineering graduation rates, TETC has two other missions: to increase diversity among those students and to encourage more collaboration between industry and higher education.

While it's early days yet, and it's also clear that one relatively small program alone can't solve a problem of such magnitude, TETC has certainly done itself and Texas proud. It's raised $16.8 million and awarded $14.6 million in 47 separate grants to 23 schools. And there are indications it's having an effect. At TETC-funded schools, electrical engineering graduation rates are up 36.2 percent; computer science rates are up 24.7 percent. Moreover, the rate of the decline in computer science enrollments at those schools slowed to 40 percent between 2001 and 2004, compared with the national slide of 60 percent. "I could make the case for you that TETC is the reason" for those improvements, says Ray Almgren, the TETC chairman who is also vice president of product marketing and academic relations at National Instruments, based in Austin, Texas. His predecessor as TETC chairman agrees. "It has made a difference," says Tegwin Pulley, vice president of Texas Instruments. TETC has also impressed disinterested experts. A team of outside evaluators concluded in January 2005 that TETC is "an outstanding concept" run by highly motivated individuals. "In short," they raved, "this is an excellent program." Moreover, several other states, including West Virginia, may use TETC as a model for their own programs.