TROUBLE ON THE HORIZON

At a time when the nation needs more engineers to stay competitive, ASEE's new numbers show declining enrollments, particularly among women.

NOT LONG ago, while hosting an event at Michigan's Kettering University to introduce high schoolers to engineering, Betty Shanahan, executive director of the Society of Women Engineers, sat next to a young woman-a high school junior-during a banquet. The girl's mother wanted her to consider an engineering career, hut the young woman was eager to go into medicine instead. Shanahan suggested that she take engineering as a "pre-med bachelor's degree," which would later give her two options: either to pursue an M.D. or remain in engineering. What did the girl ultimately decide? Shanahan doesn't know. But the girl's lack of enthusiasm for engineering isn't unique-especially among young women.

That's a message that comes through clearly in statistics recently compiled by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) for the 2004-05 academic year. They indicate that engineering graduation and enrollment rates at U.S. universities are not keeping up with the country's increasing demand for engineering talent. To be sure, there was a fractional uptick in the number of bachelor's degrees conferred, continuing a growth cycle that began in 2000. But enrollments are down for the second year running, an indication that graduation rates will soon follow. Moreover, on a per capita basis, less than 5 percent of all undergraduate degrees were awarded to engineers, compared with almost 8 percent in 1985A big reason for the demand gap: two huge talent pools that could help bolster student numbers remain largely untapped. Engineering docs not attract sufficient numbers of women (who comprise 56 percent of the U.S. population) or African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans (who together account for 25 percent of the population), despite ongoing recruitment efforts to increase their representation. The number of women either earning undergraduate degrees in engineering or enrolling in engineering programs declined last year, while the graduation rate for blacks and Hispanics hasn't moved in a decade -it's still a combined total of about 11 percent.

One problem, says Jacquelynnc Eccles, a research scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Research on Women and Gender and coauthor of a big 2003 study on why girls shun careers in engineering and science, is that despite good intentions, programs to increase diversity in engineering have actually lost funding since the 1980s. "There may be more rhetoric now than actual funding," she says. Indeed, Legand Burgc, dean of the College of Engineering, Architecture and Physical Sciences at Tuskegee University, says "there needs to be more of a national commitment to improve the teaching of technology" at the pre-collegiate level to get young people more interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STKM) degrees.

African-Americans received just 5.3 percent of the engineering bachelor's degrees awarded last year, while Hispanics received 5.8 percent. That's little changed from 1999, when the graduation rate for blacks was 5.4 percent and for Hispanics, 5.8 percent. Women received 19.5 percent of the degrees awarded in 2005, down from 20.3 percent a year earlier. That decline won't be stopping soon, either. Enrollment levels for women have also fallen to 17.5 percent. Women arc, however, fairly strongly represented within some disciplines. Women took home 42.9 percent of the environmental engineering degrees awarded and 42.4 percent of the biomedical engineering degrees. Other engineering disciplines in which female graduates are better represented are agricultural, chemical, industrial/manufacturing and metallurgical/materials. But those arc six niche fields, accounting for just 17 percent of all engineering degrees. Within the six engineering disciplines that comprise 63 percent of all degrees-mechanical, aerospace, computer, computer science, electrical and electrical/ computer-female students remain as rare as Apple computers in a Microsoft world. For instance, only 113 percent of computer engineering degrees went to women; and just 13 percent of the mechanical engineering graduates were women.