New ACM President chimes in...

Posted by bmonsour § July 14, 2006 (permalink)

Stuart FeldmanCNET has an interview with Stuart Feldman. He's the new president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Responding to a question about the state of technical education in the United States, he responds:

I just came back from a conference of heads of computer science departments, and all of the attendees were concerned actually about the number and quality of students that they're seeing at the advanced levels and the continued fall in the U.S. The ongoing decrease in both interest and, in some cases, quality is a very significant concern. There are also issues, such as the number of women in the pipeline to relatively low numbers, after some very considerable improvement a few years ago. These are very real concerns because the pipeline of people takes four or eight years before people who think they want to go into a field come out educated in it.

There's the question of how do you restore the level of excitement, how do you restore the realization that IT is in essence a leading technology for students to consider?

It's definitely a big problem, particularly as the baby boom generation of engineering professionals begin to exit the workforce. According to the National Science Foundation's Science & Engineering Indicators from 2004:

...the age distribution of S&E-educated individuals suggests several likely important effects on the future S&E labor force:

  • Barring large changes in degree production, retirement rates, or immigration, the number of trained scientists and engineers in the labor force will continue to increase, because the number of individuals currently receiving S&E degrees greatly exceeds the number of workers with S&E degrees nearing traditional retirement age.
  • However, unless large increases in degree production occur, the average age of workers with S&E degrees will rise.
  • Barring large reductions in retirement rates, the total number of retirements among workers with S&E degrees will dramatically increase over the next 20 years. This may prove particularly true for Ph.D. holders because of the steepness of their age profile. As retirements increase, the difference between the number of new degrees earned and the number of retirements will narrow (and ultimately disappear).

Taken together, these factors suggest a slower-growing and older S&E labor force. Both trends would be accentuated if either new degree production were to drop or immigration to slow, both concerns raised by a recent report of the Committee on Education and Human Resources Task Force on National Workforce Policies for Science and Engineering of the National Science Board (NSB 2003).