Mar 29 - Chicago Tribune


In what could be an encouraging sign of change in America's long-standing shortage of graduates prepared for high-tech careers, the hottest subject on college campuses across the nation right now seems to be renewable energy -- a surge of interest driven largely by the specter of global warming.

Concern about climate change is apparently galvanizing more students to turn toward a subject involving science and engineering, educators suggest, in much the way that Moscow's launching of the Sputnik space satellite jolted Baby Boomers to turn their eyes to the stars.

Over the past year, college and university leaders say they have seen a surge of enthusiasm among undergraduates for studying energy sources that don't contribute to global pollution.

What remains uncertain is whether enthusiasm for the science and technology of renewable energy sources will carry over into graduate school, swelling the ranks of Americans with advanced degrees in such subjects.

"We have a shortfall of people to do cutting-edge research and do the innovations we need," said Vijay Dhir, dean of the engineering school at UCLA. But, he added, "The potential is there."

The rising interest in renewable energy is so new that it's not clearly reflected in the latest enrollment figures, educators say. But leaders from a range of schools across the country, including Arizona State University, Indiana University, the University of Colorado, and UCLA all say energy and sustainability are the hottest topic for their students.

President Barack Obama is mounting a multibillion-dollar push to boost so-called "clean energy," in hopes of creating millions of U.S. jobs. The effort includes stepped-up support for graduate research in the area. At the White House last week, Obama told a group of academics and energy entrepreneurs that "innovators like you are creating the jobs that will foster our recovery -- and creating the technologies that will power our long-term prosperity."

The United States has struggled in the past two decades, however, to produce enough home-grown scientists and engineers to meet the booming demand. And the foreign students who flock to American science and engineering schools by the thousands are increasingly going back to their homelands instead of pursuing careers in this country.

Enrollment in U.S. graduate engineering programs dropped more than 5 percent from 2003 to 2005, the last year for which statistics are available. At the same time, rapidly developing countries such as China and South Korea have ramped up the scale and quality of their graduate engineering programs.

Graduate science enrollment overall in the United States nearly doubled in the past two decades. But the programs are now more than half-filled with foreign students, who increasingly leave the country upon graduation: America's retention rate for international students -- the portion who remained in the country two years after earning doctoral degrees -- fell between 2003 and 2005, according to an analysis of federal data by Michael Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.

Aggravating the dearth of newly minted engineers, the rate at which American workers with science and engineering skills retire from the workforce is expected to triple over the next decade.

If that trend continues, the National Science Board warned in a 2008 report, "the rapid growth in R&D employment and spending that the United States has experienced since World War II may not be sustainable."

Business leaders are equally blunt. "The most critical challenge over the long term is people and brainpower," said Karen Harbert, who runs the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy. Without a solution, she added, "We'll be less concerned about importing oil than talent."

Obama hopes massive spending will help. His signature stimulus package includes $20 billion to support the basic and applied science research -- much by graduate students -- that could yield cheaper solar cells, more efficient wind turbines and longer-lasting batteries.

His budget would eventually triple the number of federally supported graduate student fellowships.

The increased interest among students may also reflect developments over the past few years that have raised the profile of global warming as an issue. Former Vice President Al Gore has been a tireless advocate for facing up to the problem, winning the Nobel Prize for his efforts. As presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain emphasized the issue. Even the Bush administration, which had downplayed climate change, eventually acknowledged its importance.

The nation's economic problems may also be contributing to the trend. Experts say undergraduates who once dreamed of outsized salaries in finance may now be more willing to spend five years living on modest graduate stipends, especially if they see prospects for future growth.

"In the past, very talented kids would go into business school, to Wall Street, get big bonuses," said Yannis Yortsos, the engineering dean at University of Southern California. "That may not be the case for a while. They may go into engineering instead."

Yortsos has seen a rapid rise in student interest in renewable energy research. It's driven, he says, by a "social awareness" of sustainability issues and climate change.

Loni Iverson, 21, is a senior at USC. "I became an engineer because of alternative energy and the potential it had" to solve problems, said Iverson, a mechanical engineering student who assists a professor's research into fuel cells that run on bacteria. "In high school, I kept hearing about America's dependence on foreign oil and the war in Iraq and gas prices rising."

Dan Singleton, 25, a third-year doctoral student in USC's electrical engineering program, works with a research group that applies high-voltage power pulses to ignition systems in engines. They're working on a system that yields more power for less fuel than traditional spark plugs, potentially reducing gasoline use in cars.

"I wanted to be able to make an impact in my life," he said. "Working on energy seemed like the best way to do it."

After he earns his PhD, Singleton hopes to work with small companies doing similar work, or to start his own. That's the sort of career path the Obama administration hopes to encourage by investing in energy R&D.

Graduate research often can leads to patents, which often can lead to start-up companies, and sometimes, major industries. Economists have shown strong links between patent production and economic growth.

University presidents and deans see twin challenges: encouraging more domestic students such as Iverson to pursue graduate degrees and retaining more of the foreign students who increasingly return to their home countries after earning degrees, lured by quality jobs or pushed by complications in securing legal U.S. residence.

The immigrant scientists and engineers who study in the United States appear to be more inclined to take risks and start new companies, said Alice Gast, the president of Lehigh University. In her last job, as vice president for research at MIT, Gast noted in a 2005 faculty newsletter that the university had seen a rapid increase in patent disclosures with at least one international student involved.

Gast and other university presidents say that to keep domestic students engaged and keep international students in the U.S., the federal government must sustain its energy research spending over time. Top students, Gast said, "will go where the excitement is."

Obama's energy secretary, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, said in a recent interview that he sees "a new cadre of idealistic people who want to work on [energy] in any way they can" -- and that harnessing them is the key to the nation's future.

"You have to start the long term now," Chu said. "The long-term is being aware that a lot of students want to study science and engineering for this issue, to support them. That requires patience."

jtankersley@tribune.com

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