Too few engineers to meet Boeing's need
Adam Bruckner has noticed a disturbing trend during his 38 years as a University of Washington professor of aeronautics engineering.
His tests are less rigorous. His students, less prepared. Even the format of classes is changing, morphing into something that requires less manpower and smaller amounts of state money.
Bruckner, the chair of the only aeronautical engineering program in the Pacific Northwest, is facing a crisis: a malnourished budget and a bad case of student unpreparedness.
The best students are as good as they ever were, Bruckner said. But the rest aren't keeping pace with technological innovation in the industry.
Add this to the mix: The state's aerospace industry is in dire need of engineers. Demand consistently exceeds the state's production at a two-to-one ratio, and that supply gap is expected to widen as the industry's aging work force retires in droves.
"There aren't enough seats in the university here to be able to generate that many students," Bruckner said. "We don't want to just crank people out for the sake of cranking people out. We want to produce good engineers."
The problem isn't specific to Washington state or to one field of engineering, though a dearth of aerospace engineers is more noticeable here in the shadow of aerospace giant Boeing Co.
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