Where are all the Electrical Engineering Students?

According to Wikipedia, the phrase white elephant “refers to an extravagant, impractical gift that cannot be easily disposed of. It is said to come from the historic practice of the King of Siam (now Thailand) giving rare albino elephants to courtiers who had displeased him, so that they might be ruined by the animals' upkeep costs.” As the EU and US Congress debate on how much money is necessary to fund domestic semiconductor technology, a major skill shortage may prove a white elephant for the industry.

The “VLSI Symposium on Technology and Circuits” is one of the places I try to follow to keep track of new innovation in semiconductor design and manufacturing. At the most recent event earlier this month, the biggest news wasn’t on semiconductor or manufacturing technology at all, it was about the huge drop in the popularity of electrical engineering at higher learning facilities in the US. It came during a panel discussion on “Building the 2030 Workforce: How to Attract Great Students and What to Teach Them?”. Although microelectronics is forecast to grow quickly to become a $1 trillion industry by 2030, the big question is, how can companies be expected to take advantage of the trend when there is a huge decrease in qualified electrical engineers. One slide in particular presented by Raja Koduri, Executive Vice President and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group at Intel, showed that the number of students enrolling on electrical engineering courses has fallen off a cliff, while students enrolling in computer science courses has grown at almost the same rate.

Although computer science has some overlap with the topics found in electrical engineering courses, there are many areas of the discipline which are not covered. The reasons for the drop are unclear, but the perceived differences in the salaries of junior engineers and software developers may be a big part of it. It could even be the fact that computer science is taught in schools, capturing the imagination of children early, while a only a small part of electrical and electronic engineering is taught, primarily as part of the physics curriculum. Whatever the reason, the slide, which I’ve used as the main image of the article, tells a story in itself. It is ironic at a time when there is a $52 bn bill sitting waiting to be passed by the US congress to be used to increase the competitiveness of the US semiconductor industry and Intel, TSMC, Samsung and others have announced major plans for new foundries in the US, that the people who’d be expected to staff those facilities are not being trained in the engineering discipline that is most appropriate. It is also ironic as this drop comes at such an exciting time for the industry as electrical and electronic engineering is at the heart of new innovation in the IoT, medicine, transportation and industry.

Hopefully, some of the new funding mentioned previously, along with the funds that the EU has earmarked to boost the European technology industry is spent on trying to attract the brightest and best students into electrical engineering or it could be a colossal waste of money.