Did American society do a poor job at inspiring American youth to go into science or engineering careers during the 2000s?

[NickGOT456]

I went to a typical middle class American public school district in a semi rural suburban area during the 2000s and early 2010s and I find it sad I never knew anyone from my school years who went into science or engineer and I find it kind of sad.

I heard the 1960s American space race inspired many American youth to go into science or engineering and those children ended up giving us the 1990s tech boom.

Would I have known at least two people who have have been inspired to go into science or engineering if there was a massive space race going on in the 2000s?

Is 2000s American culture to blame? It seems like my generation, the "Millennials" and wider American society thought that achieving luxurious lifestyles in Los Angeles or New York was the ultimate aspiration.

Is the American style of excessive capitalism to blame? People have to go in debt to get a college degree.

It is sad American society during the 2000s did not care about climate change or building a better future.

[Altherion]

I don't think there is a lack of scientists or engineers in the US. The problem is that addressing climate change or building a better future is not something that makes a great deal of money so the number of jobs in these fields is relatively small and the few that exist are not very spread out (i.e. one would have to move to get them). Thus, many scientists and some engineers go into finance or tech where their training is not particularly relevant, but the jobs are more plentiful.

In other words, the issue is not with the 2000s, it's with today. The people with money are much more interested in AI and novel financial trickery than they are in climate change.

[Wilbur]

Also, a lot of the corporate drivers for students to go into STEM were killed off at the beginning of the century.

Old line, engineering-driven companies like Allied Signal (now Honeywell), Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Boeing, and IBM had their CEO positions taken from leaders who sought organic growth and market growth via technology ideation, and replaced by leaders who sought the approval of Wall Street and engaged in financial engineering instead.

These companies, the semiconductor ODMs, and others that shared that engineering, research and design-driven ethos, used to give engineers and researchers sabbaticals to extend their personal studies or to volunteer in schools.  I had high school classes taught for at least nine weeks of a semester by guys who worked at Monolithic Memories, Borland Software, and Motorola, and their war stories inspired me to also go into the semiconductor industry.

But this all changed.  When CEOs like Ed Zander and Sanjay Jha sat in the chair at Motorola, with one hand they closed down the Physical Science Research Labs, shuttered Motorola University, parted out the sectors, groups, and businesses and sold them off to General Dynamics, Continental AG, etc. or spun them off into companies like Freescale Semiconductor, On Semiconductor, etc. and "returned the proceeds to shareholders" until Motorola is practically now just a brand name used by Chinese companies.  Inventing the technology in the iPhone for Apple, a terrible customer, was a lot of work, while buying back stock and selling off business can be done in a conference room very profitably for executives.  With the other hand they gutted the internals of Motorola and stopped the community outreach that allowed R&D and engineers to teach and volunteer.

Same thing happened when Scott McNealy was succeeded by Jonathan Schwartz at Sun.  So much of how we interact with the online world today originated in Santa Clara on that lovely, lovely campus, where amazing engineers built the tools of tomorrow.  But Sun stopped innovating, reduced their investment in both R&D and outreach, and milked their cash cows to death.

Boeing - watch any one of the hundreds of videos about how Boeing went from a leader in aerospace innovation to a company trying to meet Wall Street's quarterly expectations by iterating on the 737, an airframe designed in the 1960s.  Boeing's presence in local school around Seattle is also nil these days.  How is that working out?

IBM was probably the leader in abandoning its leadership position in ideation and community involvement under Louis V. Gerstner.  Formerly one of the two massive, runaway leaders (along with Motorola) in internally-generated patent portfolios, with an R&D budget to match and a strong culture of community involvement up until Akers left the CEO suite, Gerstner, a banker and McKinsey alumni, changed the focus.  No longer would IBM invest in long-term, capital-intensive functions like materials science research for advancing semiconductor silicon on insulates.  Instead, IBM made the switch to services and stock buybacks.  Palmisano, Rometty and Krishna have all doubled down on that choice, and I bet no one on the board has ever seen an IBM employee in a classroom or a school club talking about engineer design.  And when you send out an RFP today, the team IBM sends to market their solutions is no longer the A-team.

Wall Street, McKinsey, and the MBAs with decision-making skills dependent on spreadsheets don't give a good god damn about organic growth, community involvement, or ideation as the key to success.  Corporations who genuflect to the unholy trinity will never "waste their resources" investing in the future of engineering.

Here endeth the lesson.

 

Edited March 3 by Wilbur
added links

[maarsen]

General Motors went the same way. Sometime in the 80s the CEO of GM rather than being an engineer,  was a marketing guy. I remember all this because an automotive columnist in a newspaper commented on it and predicted GM's downfall from this decision. 

[Loge]

Hewlett Packard was a great company. Then Carly Fiorina came and decided that you don't need expensive R&D when you can make money selling overpriced ink cartridges. Other companies that went under are Digital, Silicon Graphics, and Cray. But in those cases the demise was caused by competition from cheap PC hardware.

As for Americans studying science and engineering, the country has always relied on importing brainpower from Europe and Asia. Look at who runs Microsoft and Google.

[Lord of Oop North]

There are lots of engineers. In Canada we probably have too many if we are being honest.

The problem is we didn't and don't really encourage people to go into technical fields where they actually know how to build things. I don't just mean skilled trades, but technicians of various disciplines. You do not need to be a P.Eng to go that route.

This is changing slowly.

 

[baxus]

The lack of interest for engineering in general population is not a USA thing, it's worldwide thing. I'm an electrical engineer who lives in Serbia and most of my friends I've known before going to the university have picked vocations outside of engineering. My gymnasium curriculum was focused on math and science and we were THE prime demographics for future engineers. Still, out of 43 of us "only" 7 ended up as engineers (2 of which got a PhD in engineering, though).

Obviously, my friends from college and work later on make my view of how many people go into engineering extremely biased.  

[Wilbur]

22 hours ago, NickGOT456 said:

I heard the 1960s American space race inspired many American youth to go into science or engineering and those children ended up giving us the 1990s tech boom.

I want to say one more thing about this 1960s-70s era generation of leaders, specifically and anecdotally.  Your contention seems right on to me, particularly in America.

My own career roadmap ran through the influences of numerous managers and executives who lived through this era, and although they were all very different individually and personally, almost all of them had one shared interest.  That interest was to foster science and exploration, and they manifested it by sharing their knowledge with younger, less experienced co-workers and encouraging, even mandating, outside involvement for their subordinates, thereby inculcating us with a similar ideal.

Some of these outside areas of exploratory focus included teaching weaving, math and cryptography on the Navajo Nation, leading a rocketry club at the local high school, coaching various sports at local schools, leading birdwatching trips for young kids, teaching / mentoring beekeepers, and various direct-action charitable endeavors (not United Way, but the real thing).  An eclectic bunch of hobbies, you might say, but the through-line for all of them is that they used their subject matter expertise to aid others to learn more about how the world works or to gain a foot up on their steps to an improved situation, very much in line with the spirit of JFK's most famous speech.

So for instance, for four years at Motorola I had a primary boss who enacted this paternalistic view of forcing us outside our narrow job responsibilities to participate in and contribute to the community.  Once a quarter we would shuck our work clothes and go drive forklifts and unload and re-pack stuff at St. Vincent de Paul as a department for a day or two to help them clear out backlogs in their warehouse.  My individual personal commitment under him had an agendum of "public presentation and guidance to educational groups", and as I was promoted up through management, this ended up with me addressing the MBA students once a semester at ASU.  I would talk for an hour and then answer questions about how to create and document a personal career roadmap, but also evangelize them on the idea that spreadsheets are not the ultimate driver of decision-making, and that they should always look to their people first.

This ASU address also gave me connections with the high-potential MBA students, a couple of whom I hired straight out of school, which was very different from the usual highly-experienced profile of my hires.  Of those two students, today one is a group CFO of a technology MNC and the other is the co-owner and president of a regional service business.

By contrast, I subsequently worked for a single year at what was at the time the world's largest OSAT.  The day after one of these sessions, the corporate treasurer, a young Jewish MBA originally from a New York consulting firm whose office was next to mine, asked what I had been doing.  When I told her, she upbraided me for "wasting time on unprofitable activities."  She would not listen to the idea that it was our responsibility as leaders to help the future generations.  To her, all of that was useless, since it didn't represent a positive outcome on the quarterly income statement, and she didn't care at all what happened in the vague future when the company would find it difficult to recruit and retain talented staff.  None of that could be calculated in her bonus equation.  Utter disdain for the idea would best describe her attitude.

Leaving that company was one of the easiest and most refreshing decisions I ever made.  Also, please note that they are no longer the world's largest OSAT, nor the process technology leader.  That young lady did become their CFO for a while, though, although correlation is not necessarily causation.

So your idea that the leaders of that generation had a paternalistic intention to engage in science and exploration and encourage us, the next generation, to do the same very much represents my personal experience.  My generation included a lot of leaders who, as Altherion noted, didn't give a damn about anything outside of this quarter's bonus money and pleasing those who held the purse strings.

[Bironic]

On a more distant note last week tonight has a segment about Boeing, but you could probably insert any company you want instead of it.

[Iskaral Pust]

In the 2000s, America was still very focused on STEM education, especially as a backlash against indulgent, unemployable grads from frou-frou arts majors.  But now, as our son gets close to college applications, I wouldn’t recommend that he pursue a deep STEM program in college.  They’re just too narrow and limiting.  Even with him crushing AP Physics and AP Calculus BC in junior year of HS, he’s also very strong at History, English, Spanish, Jazz.  He would be better served by a liberal arts college program that lets him explore his breadth further, including some good STEM options, but not narrowly focused there.  

Although my education was in deep applied mathematics with no other exploration, now I look at deep STEM focus as better suited for people with a strong left-brain skew either by strong preference or narrower skill breadth, or else with a strong focus on establishing a good, reliable career that probably has a limited ceiling.

Maximizing the long term career is not helped by getting stuck in a narrow technical field.  A largish portion of my MBA program at UChicago were engineers trying to plot a course out of Caterpillar or similar into private equity or start-ups.  After only 5-8 years in engineering, they were already worried about their jobs becoming repetitive mid-level dead-ends.

[baxus]

On 3/11/2024 at 4:40 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

But now, as our son gets close to college applications, I wouldn’t recommend that he pursue a deep STEM program in college.  They’re just too narrow and limiting.

Based on the "sample" (made of my friends, family etc.), that may or may not be representative, I'd say that an average engineer is much better educated on the subjects of history, literature etc. than an average historian or language and literature major is on the subject of engineering. I'd say that's mostly because history, literature, art and so on are still considered "general education".

Edited March 13 by baxus