By Pam Losefsky | Photos by Marsha Miller
When he was a high school student, Scott Berry (BSCE ’99) had no idea what an engineer was.
Now both a licensed engineer and high school teacher, Berry’s goal is to make sure every kid has the opportunity to know exactly what engineers do and how the math and science they study in school applies to the complex projects engineers tackle every day— building bridges, roads and wastewater systems; programming robotics; building instruments; and searching for natural resources.
With the United States facing a substantial projected need for engineers in the next 20 years, Texas is seeking to reverse a trend of declining student interest and scores in high school science and math. By training teachers to be better science coaches, encouraging kids to “try out” for technical careers early and offering competitive engineering scholarships for college-bound seniors, industry-academic collaborations and a new Texas state law encourage teens to “letter in engineering.”
Can students who earn high marks in pre-engineering classes possibly compete for social status with the captain of the football team or the soccer star? Perhaps not, but if Berry has anything to do with it, engineering classes are about to be a whole lot less “uncool.” When Lake Travis High School offered Berry’s first engineering class two years ago, 60 students signed up. For the 2007-08 academic year, 180 enrolled.
Scott Berry (BSCE '99) helps a student attending his middle school engineering camp launch a soda bottle rocket.
He attributes the appeal of the program to its project orientation and real-world application. “Especially in math, it’s hard for kids to see a real reason for it, but the engineering courses provide a bridge,” he says. “They won’t just take our word for it that it has an application, but they believe it when they can see it directly.”
Berry uses Project Lead the Way, one of several technology curricula now commercially available to school districts that can afford to purchase them and train their teachers.
And more and more school districts are making the investment, thanks to the glare of the national spotlight on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education.
Technologically Challenged
At the national level, calls to strengthen STEM education have been circulating for years. Starting as early as 1986, officials noted a decline in the number of U.S. engineering graduates per capita compared to the number of such graduates in up-and-coming countries such as China, India and Korea. Twenty years later, a 2006 report from the nonprofit testing service, ACT, clearly identified declining high school student interest in STEM subjects and its relationship to college readiness. “Not since the mid-1950s has our nation faced a more serious shortage of skilled workers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields,” declare the report’s authors, ominously. “We can and must reinvigorate these professions if the United States is to maintain a strong position in the competitive global marketplace.”
Further, a May 2006 Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report for Congress stated that “among the 40 countries participating in the 2003 Program for International Student Assessment, the U.S. ranked 28th in math literacy and 24th in science literacy.” Repeating the same concern, this year the National Academy of Sciences released its report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” which warned of the economic and social consequences of diminishing technical talent within the United States.
Popular opinion holds that as young people’s interests turned to computer games and videos over the past two decades, they abandoned hands-on and engaging toys like erector sets. And just because kids enjoy using technology doesn’t mean they have an interest in learning how it works.
In addition, teacher training began focusing more on the mechanics of teaching than on content. All the other things teachers are now required to do—testing, discipline, logistics and managing large classes—prevented them from motivating their classes and getting kids excited about learning.
Whatever the reason for the current state of affairs, it’s clear that something must change. With the success of the U.S. economy riding on the nation’s ability to stay at the forefront of technology, a dearth of engineers and computer scientists seriously threatens our long-term growth.
With increased awareness, the 109th U.S. Congress (that ended in January 2007) passed several bills containing STEM-related proposals, including measures to provide grants and scholarships to students studying STEM subjects, to establish summer internship programs at national laboratories, to recruit and train new STEM teachers and to fund graduate research fellowships in critical fields. However, funding for all these initiatives is not necessarily secured and their impact in Texas, specifically, not guaranteed.
State of the State
In a state that boasts about being bigger and better and more pioneering than any other, it’s a matter of pride that Texas pick itself up by its bootstraps and take care of its own.
Six years ago the Texas Engineering and Technical Consortium (TETC) was formed to raise money from corporate and federal sources and seek matching funds from the Texas Legislature to recruit and retain students. Participating companies all have a major presence in Texas—Texas Instruments, National Instruments, Motorola, AMD, Intel, Applied Materials and Hewlett-Packard—and a keen interest in homegrown technical talent. In six years, TETC has raised $17 million.
TETC marshaled support for attracting qualified high school students into university engineering and computer science programs, then retaining them within those programs. It also uncovered a need for identifying and qualifying more students in high school.
“Some would suggest that we can change our laws to import more engineers and computer scientists, but this overlooks the fact that we have tens of thousands of Texas high school graduates who have the skills to excel in engineering and computer science, but fail to enter our engineering schools because they are not informed of the merits of engineering and computer science degrees,” Kenneth Dickerson, retired senior vice president of ARCO, declares. “With a focused effort by the legislature, educators, and parents, this can be changed.”
A member of the Cockrell School’s advisory board, Dickerson is one of several leaders in the industry who leapt into action last year to make sure the issue of STEM education was on the state’s agenda. His motivation was fueled by discussions he’d had with University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas at Dallas officials who expressed concern that Texas was not graduating enough engineers and that our young people receive inadequate exposure to the sciences.
Dean Streetman was one of those academic leaders interested in boosting enrollment in engineering schools across the state. “At UT, we graduate close to 1,000 engineering undergrads a year, but that’s not enough to fill the need now, let alone the need projected over the next 20 years,” says Streetman. “We want to see high school kids ‘lettering in engineering’ and entering college prepared to be academic stars.”
As a dean at a state institution, Streetman can’t lobby the legislature, so it has been imperative that industry leaders talk to their legislators about this issue. “They’ve been very effective in stating our case,” Streetman says.
Dickerson recruited other influential industry leaders to lead his charge, gathering along the way volunteers like Joe Blandford (BSCE ’79), founder of Atlantia and former chair of the Cockrell School’s Engineering Advisory Board; Berry Grubbs (MSCE ’65), founder of Terra-Mar; Dick Perkins (BSASE ’64, MSASE ’66), vice president of Cox and Perkins; Jack Randall (BSCE ’72, MSCE ’75), current advisory board chair and co-founder, Jefferies Randall & Dewey; and industry representatives from the engineering advisory boards of virtually every state university offering engineering degrees. They formed an organization to sponsor legislation that would fund some important STEM education initiatives.
“The first order of business was getting the state legislature to recognize the need,” Grubbs says of the group’s action plan. So, like any good engineer would, they commissioned a study—in this case, a study of the engineering profession in Texas.
Conducted by economist Ray Perryman and The Perryman Group, the study made some stark observations:
- Texas—second only to California in population—ranks ninth out of the 10 most populous states in the number of science/engineering degrees awarded per thousand college-age residents.
- Texas’ rate of awarding technical degrees has remained essentially flat during the past 10 years, while other states have seen notable gains.
- California, Georgia and New Jersey—states that regularly compete with Texas for quality corporate relocations—are currently outpacing Texas in terms of graduating engineering and computer science degree-holders by almost 20 percent in some cases.
- An increase of 25 percent in the state’s engineering graduation rates would result in $6 billion in annual economic value added to Texas within 15 years. The Perryman Group measures that economic output in terms of the value provided by the engineering services in addition to the impact of more engineers spending money and paying taxes in the state.
- If Texas gains a mere 1 percent in the U.S. market share for these industries, The Perryman Group finds, the result would be more than 174,000 permanent jobs and almost $17 billion (constant 2006 dollars) in annual output.
The report’s findings made state legislators sit up and take notice.
Dickerson’s group originally had four goals, including getting public schools to add a fourth science course requirement for high school graduation and an engineering elective to the high school curriculum. In May 2006 the legislature changed the law to require a fourth science course in high school. In mid 2007 the State Board of Education indicated that Texas high schools could offer a course in engineering for credit as one of the required science courses. Two down. Two to go.
Their other two goals required further legislative action—funding to enable middle schools to offer engineering summer camps and funding to enable Texas universities to offer engineering scholarships to high-potential seniors. The result of their efforts is HB 2978, which Governor Rick Perry signed into law in June 2007. “The funding [reduced from the original $20 million requested to $2 million] is far less than required to enable Texas to compete with other states and nations,” laments Dickerson. “But it represents a start.”
Hard and Rewarding Work
On campus, The University of Texas at Austin’s Engineering Career Assistance Center office acts as a marketplace barometer. Actively serving almost 1,000 graduating seniors each year, the office gauges demand by the number of companies it must turn down for entrance to its career fairs and by the number of offers students have the luxury of considering before accepting the one that fits best with their career plans and preferences for workplace culture.
“Right now the market certainly favors students,” says Michael Powell, director of career services. “But even during the lean times, the demand is always there; they just won’t get multiple offers or they have to dig a little deeper to find what they really want.”
If the trends outlined above continue unchecked, 10 years from now the university’s engineering grads, as well as those from other Texas campuses, will truly be like athletic stars, highly sought after and desperately wooed by competing employers.
But if Dickerson and his colleagues have anything to do with it, future engineering grads will find themselves working harder to find jobs. The state can’t afford to be that short on people with the skills to solve the nation’s technological challenges, he says.
The passage of HB 2978 is just the beginning. Dickerson believes middle and high schools, universities and professionals all need to stay visible and to encourage state government to continue to support the programs at even higher levels.
“We need to involve 4,000 to 5,000 middle and high school students in engineering summer programs each year, and we need to fund tuition and scholarships for every qualified student who will study engineering and computer science in one of our state universities,” Dickerson declares. “We need to persuade our brightest that a career in science is just as rewarding, if not more so, than economics, finance, law or athletics.”
Like high school teacher Scott Berry, Cockrell School Dean Streetman believes a project-oriented approach allowing kids to see how they can apply what they’re learning is the key to converting them. “Today’s students are very concerned about making a difference in society,” he points out. “When they see that an engineering career is a wonderful way to contribute to a lot of important societal issues surrounding water, resources and energy, they will come around.”
Berry and his fellow high school teachers weren’t waiting around for HB 2978 to be signed into law before giving science and technology a little pep rally and working to fill up the pipeline to Lake Travis High School’s engineering program. This summer, they created two one-week engineering summer camps for middle school children that drew 25 sixth- and seventh-graders to Hudson Bend Middle School and left many would-be campers on waiting lists. Eschewing water parks and outdoor adventures for one rainy week in central Texas, the math-minded campers spent their days building rockets and programming robots using an icon-based coding application called RoboPro.
They weren’t there necessarily to become engineers—some attended because their parents made them; others because it sounded like fun; and one girl had already decided she wanted to be an architect or a pediatrician. But they all agreed the projects were cool, and they picked up the concepts with ease: flow charts, inputs and outputs, switches and looped systems.
Berry planted a seed. They were learning the language of engineering and a thought process fundamental to a host of potential technical professions.
Lighting the Spark: Programs for Students
Making engineering exciting and accessible to kids, the Cockrell School does its part to encourage the next generation of engineers →
Alumni Making a Difference: From the Classroom to the Boardroom
Cockrell School alumni address engineering workforce concerns at every level →