When Arami Rosales was little, she wanted to be an astronomer. However, like most childhood dreams, Arami’s didn’t survive long once she got to high school. However, Arami’s dream didn’t die in disillusion the way so many youthful fantasies do. It morphed and evolved. During her freshman year at Liberal Arts and Science Academy High School in Austin, Texas, she joined the school’s FIRST Robotics team (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). Now, three years along, the 17-year-old, grade-11 student is leading her team, Purple Haze, into this year’s competition and planning a career in engineering.

This is exactly the kind of change of heart people such as International Society of Automation (ISA) Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Gouhin, James Truchard, president and chief executive officer of Austin, Texas-based automation vendor National Instruments Corp., and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson want to see. Each of these people, and many more, have been growing more and more concerned about a threat looming over not only the high-tech industry but the future national security and prosperity of the United States.

In a June 2008 speech to the American Society for Mechanical Engineers, Jackson put it thus, “The question is: are we, as a nation, equipped with the human capital for the robust innovation the ... challenge demands of us? Innovation requires investment in research and development, of course, but fundamentally, it requires people. As a university president, and as a theoretical physicist, I have deep concerns that our national innovation capacity is in jeopardy. Converging forces have created what I call the ‘Quiet Crisis,’ which is eroding the production of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technologists we must have for the scope of innovation these challenges demand.”

Jackson’s fear, that in the very near future there won’t be enough trained engineers and scientists to meet our society’s current needs, let alone invent new technologies and support economic growth, is borne out by the statistics being produced by increasingly fearful bureaucrats and industry observers.

By most projections, upwards of 25 percent of the engineers and scientists that make up America’s innovative brain trust will retire within the next few years. For example, according to a November 2006 report from the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, “nearly one-third of the civilian scientific and technical workforce in the Department of Defense is currently eligible to retire” and less than 10 percent of NASA’s scientific staff are under 40 years of age. These are the people whose imaginations were galvanized by Sputnik and responded to President John F. Kennedy’s call to action to help America win the space race. They are responsible for the tremendous technology-driven prosperity experienced in the ‘90s, and they will all be gone soon, leaving a vacuum where the country’s innovation advantage used to be.

Of course, the problem is not one of those that can be solved with a snap of the finger. According to Stephanie Brierty, K-12 academic program manager at National Instruments, it is deeply rooted in a cultural apathy toward science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Celebrate education

“The issue is that the United States doesn’t celebrate a good education and intelligence the way other countries do. Here we celebrate basketball and rock stars and don’t stress education as an important part of their lives. You can see that in some public schools where they have some budget; if there is competition between the football team and the computer lab, the team gets new jerseys and the lab goes without.”

“The media glorifies many professions—medicine, law enforcement, and so on. But there is nothing that glorifies scientists or engineers,” says University of Cincinnati Professor Kelly Cohen, Ph.D. “And if they do ...then it’s geek imagery, he never gets the girl...those images put a damper on interest (in a STEM career).”

The scope of the problem is such that any solution must involve both government and industry and take the long view, something that can be challenging for a business which is usually more concerned with the quarterly earnings statements than where its innovation is going to come from ten years down the road.

“The danger is in waiting to address the crisis until it is upon us, because then—due to the cumulative, decades-long nature of the education of a scientist or engineer—it will be too late,” says Rensselaer’s Jackson. “We must wake up to the crisis because the United States’ capacity for innovation is inextricably interlinked with our economic and ...