Commentary: February 2006

By Jim Cooper, Maplesoft

The standard of living in North America is the envy of the rest of the world. Adjusted for purchasing power, per capita income in the U.S. and Canada is well above even the relatively wealthy nations of Western Europe and Japan. While many factors have contributed to this happy situation, few would doubt that the continuous stream of technological innovations developed by North American engineers and scientists is one of the greatest contributors to our success.

Yet growing evidence suggests that this lead is eroding, which threatens our position as the world’s technological leader. One major cause for concern is the fact that North America’s best students seem to increasingly prefer fields such as law and medicine over engineering and science. In 2000, the U.S. graduated 199,057 engineers and scientists. By 2004 that figure had dropped by 39 percent to 143,067.

The countries we compete against in these fields have dramatically increased the rate at which they are graduating scientists and engineers. For example, China has increased the number of scientific and engineering degrees its schools have awarded by 28 percent from 2000 to 2004 to 283,080. In 2004, Indian universities awarded nearly 290,000 engineering degrees alone.

At the same time the number of North American science and engineering students is falling, the Baby Boom generation is reaching retirement. The front end of the space race generation, which grew up respecting the wonders that could be achieved by the application of technology, is now reaching its golden years. The people who created the technological and intellectual capital that made their companies great are rapidly retiring.

We should all be concerned. It will be difficult to replace these talented people when facing a reduced pool of technical graduates. Because great amounts of current engineering knowledge is either carried around in the heads of those facing retirement or badly documented,  there’s good reason to fear that their companies will fall behind foreign competitors that benefit from an increasing stream of technical graduates.

The long-term solution for this dilemma is a drastic improvement of the image of technology in North America to convince more of our best and brightest students to enter the technical fields. In an open market,  however, it’s not clear how to do this. Even if our younger generation recognizes the importance of technology in building a better future, it could take many years to compensate for the smaller numbers of graduating engineers and scientists.

In the meantime, there are several steps North American companies can take to address the shortage of scientific and engineering talent. The first is to take advantage of the current technical expertise in North American companies by fully documenting the knowledge of their best people. The second is to maximize the productivity of existing engineers by investing in tools that will help them create better products and processes in less time. In many cases, these two steps can be combined by capturing current engineering know-how with automated tools like Maple;  programs that can preserve these methodologies and skills forever.

If we can plan to capitalize on the massive amount of technical information accumulated in our best companies, North America should gain technical wherewithal to compete for decades to come. This will give us time to focus on reversing the direction of our best students and help them move back to technical careers.

Jim Cooper is president and CEO of Maplesoft. Since earning a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in Ontario in 1980, Cooper has helped develop a number of high-technology startups and has held a number of senior positions with companies like Sema Group Wireless, SCI, and aircraft flight simulator supplier CAE. To comment on this essay, please send an e-mail by clicking here. Please reference “Cooper Commentary, February 2006” in your message.