If there is a silver lining in this, it is the widely acknowledged performance of historically black institu- tions of higher education in identifying, encouraging and nurturing African American youth to develop their abilities in the sciences and engineering. As Dr. James Johnson, dean emeritus at Howard University, along with the other members of the Council of Deans, stated repeatedly at the annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conferences they co-host, HBCU faculty and administrators provide a nurturing environment that regularly produces new crops of STEM professionals out of a recruiting base heavily weighted toward students representing the first genera- tion in their families even to attempt to go to college. And the HBCU engineering programs routinely enroll enough female students to make up percentages of 35 percent or higher.
Doubters have only to look halfway back down the past decade, to the day North Carolina A&T State Uni- versity graduated 22 black Ph.D.s in engineering, out- performing every other institution of higher learning in America and shaming some of the biggest. Or look at the current enrollment, for which the 14 Council of Deans schools contain nearly a third of America’s undergraduate black engineering majors.
Technology: Challenges or Opportunities?
Bloomberg Business Week magazine’s March 22 edi- tion looked hard at the economic potential of Qatar, in the Persian Gulf. “Qatar on the Cusp” took the position that the Gulf Emirate, the latest darling of Western invest- ment bankers, is now one of its region’s “most important places”: “After more than a decade of careful, costly devel- opment, the Qataris [population 1.5 million] are starting to reap the benefit of having in their territorial waters the world’s largest natural gas deposit, the North Field–900 trillion cubic feet of reserves, two-thirds the size (in oil barrel equivalents) of Saudi Arabia’s reserves of crude.”
While that is an amazing figure, the 25-35 trillion cubic feet projected to be recoverable from the Haynes- ville Shale formation under eastern Texas and Louisiana is producing a “Gold Rush” for investors and drillers on its own. That formation and the Barnett Shale (estimated 29-39 trillion cubic feet), also under Texas, sit right in the middle of the “Oil Patch” where America’s hydrocarbon energy industry has been entrenched since the discovery of the West Texas oil field during the early decades of the 20th Century.
That is, they are close to the business leadership, the entrepreneurial drilling fraternity, and the pipeline pumping terminals that could get that methane to market in the big cities and industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest quickly and economically. And the Marcellus Shale, under 575 square miles of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland, with estimated reserves of up to 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, is even closer to the country’s major metropolitan population centers, prompting yet another Gold Rush and a corresponding call for development of a brand-new new workforce to exploit it and bring its reserves to market.
It is fashionable for business analysts and reporters to focus on the gargantuan fortunes that might be made in you-name-it-the-hot-country overseas, but the fact remains
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that opportunities inside the United States’ own borders are actually more reachable, with less political jeopardy— and the tensions and unrest from populations feeling ex- ploited in the developing world—for all of the Americans likely to be involved.
Ditto for the national angst over a “brain drain” from the top U.S. engineering schools and business colleges. The same edition of Bloomberg Biz Week reported, on page 86, that “In Asia, M.B.A.s can make an impact faster —and pay packages are competitive with those in the U.S.” That story gushed expansively and nervously about the rush of business-school graduates from America’s most-revered institutions to take jobs in Asia, after being feverishly recruited by companies operating in China, Vietnam, India, South Korea, and Hong Kong. It also could have added the Philippines and Malaysia, for that matter.
What both of these stories–and a raft of others about stratosphere-high office towers, huge hydroelectric projects, all-new industrial centers and massive road- building, railroad, and airport development projects being highlighted on almost a weekly basis by American news agencies—really are saying is that burgeoning opportuni- ties overseas now make it highly unlikely that America can expect to continue its old practice of recruiting whatever talent it needs for industrial projects at home. Leaders of other countries have learned the American lesson about the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution and the Internet, and are racing to get in on the ground floor of the next revolution in technology products and services without waiting for Americans to demonstrate its value.
But even a cursory look at a major report such as the American Society for Civil Engineers’ Annual “Report Card(s) on America’s Infrastructure” should reveal the size of the industrial opportunities extant for Americans with an entrepreneurial bent. Not to speak of the mega-sized engineering-consulting firms such as Bechtel, Parsons Brinckerhof, and Parsons Corporation.
All of that spells O-P-P-O-R-T-U-N-I-T-Y for entrepre- neurs and entrepreneurial-minded companies that recruit American engineers, scientists and business leaders to de- velop innovative, cost-effective, environmentally friendly solutions for these problems. Make no mistake, those problems will be solved–if not by Americans themselves now, then later by foreigners coming over with their latest whiz-bang technologies to fix problems Americans once routinely invented solutions for.
The double problem here is that the workforce need- ed to meet all of the challenges and opportunities present- ed above simply does not yet exist: The Baby Boomers are retiring, and the only repositories of under-appreciated, under-trained and under-employed American labor left to be developed and exploited for the national benefit are the youth left languishing in the under-served communi- ties of color. Historically black colleges and universities, the institutions with the best experience at mining those talent veins and turning out success stories that go out to conquer the world, will require major new investments by private -sector leaders as well as by governments, or the pressing job of producing a new, well-equipped workforce of citizens rooted in America—and not looking to migrate elsewhere—will never get done. v
USBE&IT I Deans Edition SPRING 2010 45
SPECIAL EDITORIAL SECTION
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