investment in developing science and engineering manpower. Our field hearings in New Mexico addressed the requirements of high technology industry for skilled scientific and technical manpower and the efforts of the universities, the state government and industry to anticipate and respond to these requirements. My comments today reflect much of what we learned from these hearings as well as our continuing examination of the issues.

The manpower with which we are concerned will for the most part require deep understanding in the sciences or engineering, which in turn will rest on solid education in mathematics and science. Our problems originate in the earliest school years and are compounded through the educational process.

An estimated 5% of our high school students take

no math or science courses beyond the 10th grade and math SAT scores declined steadily from the early 1960's through 1980. It is estimated that there are only 10,000 physics teachers in the nation's more than 15,000 school districts. Students are not only precluding .the opportunities for scientific or technical careers but are even jeopardizing their abilities to function successfully in an increasingly technologically complex society. Until families, local school boards and state governments demand new curriculum requirements and academic rigor, major improvements are unlikely.

Beyond the secondary school level, our problem seems to be attracting the number of qualified, talented men and women needed by a technologically complex society such as ours and, almost paradoxically, providing the teachers to train and educate the rapidly growing number of students who are electing engineering as a professional goal.

There are many different estimates of our future shortages of engineers, ranging from an excess to shortfalls of tens of thousands. I don't know the answer, but I suspect that the demand will be higher than we are prepared to meet. I suspect this because of reports which I am receiving from industry, business, federal laboratories and universities, as well as the major challenges which we face in building up our national defense, developing alternative energy sources, capitalizing on the burgeoning biotechnology industry, achieving environmentally responsible economic growth, to name a few. I also

know what our competition is doing, for example:

again as large as ours about five times as many

students go on to engineering training as do in

the U.S.

By contrast, we have been training more lawyers, than much of our competition combined. In some ways,

it would seem that we have concentrated our skill on

refining our slicing of the pie while our competition focuses on enlarging theirs, often at our expense.

It is also true though that students are now

turning to engineering in record numbers and that there is a serious shortage of faculty to teach them. Estimates indicate that perhaps 2,500 out of 20,000 engineering faculty positions in this country are vacant. The problem is fairly clear industry salaries have been bid up to

the point where too many of the best students simply

cannot see the net advantages of an academic teaching and research career, or even in going on for post baccalaureate education.

While there are important governmental responsibilities in dealing with these problems, it seems to me that there are a particular challenge and opportunity for industry. Certainly industry has a major immediate stake in resolving our engineering manpower problems, since their future successes hinge in no small measure on the availability of motivated, educated graduates. the same time there is an opportunity to reestablish linkages with the academic world which have weakened over

At

the last twenty or so years.

The erosion of the former

interdependence of the two sectors is attributable in

some measure I think to the displacement of private sector
aid for research and student support by federal funding.
There is now an opportunity to redress the imbalance.

There seem to be signs already that industry is
The National Society of

responding to the challenge.

Professional Engineers, the Association of American Engineering Societies, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, the American Association of Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges are all, among others, actively examining the problems and alternative res

ponses.

Industry, too is seeking new arrangements with our colleges and universities. The boldest initiative so far was announced three weeks ago by the Exxon Education Foundation, which will provide $15 million for 100 teaching fellowships and 100 salary grants for junior faculty in the engineering fields. Sixty six U. S. colleges and universities will be beneficiaries of this program. Further, the Foundation is responding specifically to the problem which industry demand for engineers is creating quote, "The faculty shortage (in certain key fields of engineering) stems in part from the fact that industry is

I

hiring engineers immediately after they receive their bachelor's degrees at starting salaries that make graduate study and junior hiring faculty positions financially unattractive by comparison." This bold recognition of

a problem and industry responsibility should and, I believe will be followed in different forms by more of our companies and businesses in the months ahead.

While much attention deservedly is being given to

meeting the needs for university-educated engineering manpower, there is another equally important and difficult technical manpower requirement which we will need to

solve

that for skilled technicians and craftsman

such as tool and die makers, machinists and electricians. Without these skills many of the best ideas of our scientists and engineers will not be translated into the new goods and services which we need.

Japanese companies traditionally train their own

skilled technicians with confidence that these workers will

be lifetime employees.

There is no such tradition here.

West Germany provides intensive apprenticeship programs, funded jointly by industry and government, for those who do not go on to the universities.

We have tended to use the military services as the training ground for this skilled labor, which industry raids as demand requires. The implications of this