However, the number of students studying undergraduate engineering at U.S. universities fell 37 percent from 1985 to 1997. Companies have a need not only for research scientists and engineers, but for a technically-skilled workforce as a whole. To run some of our advanced SC equipment in one of our fabs, you almost have to have an engineering degree. Everything depends on that person's skill to read the controls and to anticipate what they must do. The increasing complexity of global competition calls for education and lots of it.
Education is the key to personal survival.
Education is the key to our industry's survival. Education is the key to our nation's survival. Those facts are on a collision course with other alarming trends. Nearly a million young people in the sixteen and above age groups dropped out of public schools last year. That's a national drop-out average of more than 25 percent.