News Article
Facing Global Challenge, Seagrave and ABET Prepare for Significant Change
The United States may not be prepared for the twenty-first century. So says Richard Seagrave, Anson Marston Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and president-elect of ABET, the accreditation agency for engineering, technology, computing, and applied science in the U.S.
“It’s hard to be optimistic if you accept certain propositions,” Seagrave says. “Right now we’re ‘king of the hill’ economically, and one reason is the intellectual property and royalties, licenses, and patents from scientists and engineers. But the rest of the world is increasing its numbers of scientists and engineers.” Coupled with the aging American population, the rise of technological powerhouses such as China and India, he says, will have a serious impact on American domination of global markets.
Neither, Seagrave adds, can the U.S. count on a continued influx of foreign students to do the intellectual heavy lifting. A 2003 report by the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the Council of Graduate Schools revealed sharp declines in international grad school applications to doctoral institutions in the U.S.—a trend mirrored at Iowa State, where applications decreased more than 50% between 2003 and 2004.
One reason for these figures is that increasing numbers of international students are studying outside of the U.S. Even more alarming, the report’s authors say, is “that these declines reflect the impression on the part of potential applicants that an unwelcoming climate for international students now exists in the United States.”
“And the U.S. appears uninterested in being an international partner in science and engineering, at least from the government’s point of view,” Seagrave adds. “The refusal to sign the Kyoto accords, the position on stem cell research, and the tolerance by the public of these anti-science attitudes is worrisome.”
It’s a general cultural trend that increasingly manifests itself in specific instances across the American scientific community. For example, at a recent meeting of the ABET Industrial Advisory Committee, Seagrave relates, a Hewlett-Packard executive mentioned that the company had recently hired fifteen PhD-level researchers for a major nanotech project—all educated abroad.
Seagrave was surprised, to say the least. “I had to ask the fellow three times,” he recalls. “That was the point: not that they weren’t citizens, but that they weren’t even educated in the U.S. And it’s not the only example.”
As a result of decreasing numbers of educated immigrants, not only will firms like Hewlett-Packard turn to European and Asian institutions for their intellectual capital, in the future they may well locate primary research facilities where their production sites increasingly are based—places such as Shanghai and Bangalore—further driving the outsourcing of good jobs from the U.S. As incoming head of ABET, Seagrave is aware of this trend’s challenge to the organization’s usefulness and even viability.
“We haven’t built any refineries or major chemical plants for a while—that part of our sector has moved overseas—and overseas institutions are producing their own engineers,” he notes. “So we have become discipline-based. But the disciplines are in fact interdisciplinary and emerging, so they cross the lines of present programs and present professional societies.
“It’s both microscopic and macroscopic,” he continues. “It’s going on in Sweeney Hall and between buildings on campus at a rate that’s not well understood even by the people who work here. And it’s going on between the United States, Saudi Arabia, and China at a rate that’s not well understood by those people either.”
But understanding change both in the profession and the global economy it serves, Seagrave insists, is not optional: unless it can get ahead of these rapid and radical transformations, ABET risks irrelevancy and the educational establishment it serves risks sliding into chaos. The challenge is felt keenly by Seagrave—and made only sharper by the seeming indifference of the nation’s leadership to the long-term implications of current trends.
“My perspective is that of a person who has spent much of my life trying to produce engineering graduates and seeing them become productive citizens,” he offers, and adds: “What kind of a wake-up call is it going to take for Americans? I wish I knew.”
