Does Spokane lack engineers?

Journal of Business, Jan 15, 1998

Last year, Spokane-based RAHCO International went for months without finding a single qualified engineering candidate to hire. It finally recruited one from South Africa.

Spokane headhunter Jeannine Marx, who typically has sought seasoned professionals for her clients, now is being asked to visit college campuses in hopes of snagging a few young engineering students, who she says sometimes now have committed to their future employers by the end of their junior year.

Last fall, Docent Software Inc., a software-development company that had moved here in 1994 from Palo Alto, Calif., moved its headquarters back to the Silicon Valley so it could attract more software engineers and other high-tech workers.

It's easy to see why perceptions abound that Spokane lacks the engineering-school infrastructure necessary to support economic development.

A closer look, however, reveals that Spokane schools currently offer a credible 18 four-year or graduate-level degree programs related to engineering and computer science, that there are plenty of seats available in those programs, and that most of the schools' graduates in those programs are recruited by out-of-town companies.

Local educators, employers, and business recruiters say it is a misperception to believe that the engineering education base here is inadequate. But real problems, they say, do exist. One is that schools haven't done a good enough job either of attracting young students to their engineering programs or of promoting their programs to local employers.

Another is that employers perhaps haven't done a good enough job of articulating their needs to educators.

"Actually, we have an above-average number of engineering schools for our population," says headhunter Marx, who owns JM Recruiting and often is involved in the community's efforts to recruit high-tech employers. "None of the universities, however, has done a good job of enticing, appealing to, or going after students, especially women and minorities. They're not recruiting out of high school."

Washington State University at Spokane, which has brought four master's level engineering programs here in the past decade, has been disappointed with enrollment in those programs. Gonzaga University finally discontinued its master's degree in mechanical engineering last year for lack of demand. That program hadn't had a graduate since 1993.

Gonzaga's master's degree in electrical engineering had only three grads last year, compared with 12 two years earlier. "We may have to pull the plug on that one, too," says Dennis Horn, Gonzaga's new dean of engineering.

Horn, who arrived in Spokane last summer from the Midwest, says that both the softness in enrollment and the shortage of engineering grads are national--not just local--problems. He says that engineering is attracting a shrinking share of new students compared with other areas of study.

"We don't know why," says Horn. "The job prospects are wonderful."

Graduates of engineering programs typically get multiple job offers at starting salaries in the $35,000-to-$50,000-a-year range. "The incentive should be there to drive the enrollment up," he says. "It's sort of frustrating. Young students and their parents should look at the numbers."

Horn believes, however, that engineering schools may have turned off students by being too rigid in their offerings, and that efforts now under way nationally to modify accreditation standards could give programs more latitude in their curriculums to add instruction in societal and people skills to the heavy emphases on math and science.

"We need to offer broader, more attractive programs that encourage innovation," Horn says.

Eastern Washington University, which offers two tracks in a more applied-science form of engineering degree, called engineering technology, has experienced similar problems pulling in students and educating the public about its programs, says Jim Ruch, chairman of EWU's department of technology. EWU's two engineering-technology programs together have graduated about a dozen students a year in recent years, but could produce much more. "They easily have the potential to pump out 25 to 30 (grads) a year," says Ruch. "People don't know we exist."

Out-of-town employers do.

"Last year Boeing came out and did interviews here (for jobs elsewhere)," he says. "I sent in nine students and eight got job offers. The ninth got an internship that later turned into a job." He says that Boeing hires the program's graduates at salaries in the high $30,000s.

How many graduates stay in Spokane? "Of the graduates I had last year, I can only think of three who stayed in the area," says Ruch. "The rest went to the West Side."

That again raises the issue of misperceptions. Educators and business sources seem to agree that with the national shortage of engineers, it has become less important where schools are when it comes to pumping out grads, because the recruitment pool from which employers now are fishing is national.

"What few students we have (here), the national companies are coming in and paying big salaries to get," says Marx. "There's a huge (engineer) shortage. It's absolutely a national problem."