"Flight from Science"
In a very interesting New York Times article, the fact that Japan is “running out of engineers” is explored in some detail. They note that engineering graduate numbers have been on the decline for two decades in Japan, and that they are also declining in the US. But in the US and other countries the void is being filled by foreign workers who find it very difficult to do the same in Japan’s more “closed” society.
It seems to me the writer ALMOST got to the point when saying that students are pursuing other careers such as finance and medicine, or purely creative careers such as art. In my mind this is the crux of the issue, and if anything it just means that Japanese students have been awakened to the realities of a global market faster than the rest of us. The analytical part of engineering is just that, analytical. Brute force mathematics that, frankly, can be done by anyone or by machine. This work is lost forever to high cost labor. It is neither particularly time sensitive or particularly localized and that makes it a “back office” function. The part that is left for the “western” engineer is the creativity and problem solving. In his book “A Whole New Mind” Daniel Pink crystallizes a vision of a professional in the west as the artist, guiding the activities of armies of analysists and technicians in low cost countries.
Sure, we need engineers, but they need to be trained much differently than they were in the past. The focus needs to shift away from the methodical, procedural, linear process that is classical engineering, to a broad theoretical understanding coupled with a strong set of collaboration skills and an eye for both beauty and danger. Anything that can be done in a series of steps will be sourced out to millions of engineers in China or India or wherever, and ultimately programmed so that no one needs to do it. It’s a dead end. The engineer of tomorrow needs to be an artist, a visionary. The difference is that he has the background necessary to bring the vision to reality.
