Are Whizzes Washed Up at 35?

To compete, says an M.I. T. study, they need to keep retraining

Professional football players expect it: ten or twelve years after college, their reflexes go, they slow down, younger players overtake them. But at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently, some 800 representatives from government, industry and academe were told that the same fate befalls, of all people, engineers. Particularly in the fast-moving fields of computer science and electrical engineering, former whizzes who are now middle-aged were described as fighting a losing battle to keep from falling behind intellectually. All too often, M.I.T. Electrical Engineering Professor Louis Smullin told the Oct. 2 symposium, engineers "are washed up by the time they are 35 or 40, and new ones are recruited from the universities." Said C. Gordon Bell, vice president at Digital Equipment Corp.: "The young engineers coming in are sharper than older engineers. Sometimes they blow the older engineers away."

Each year some 10,000, or 5% of the nation's electrical engineers, transfer out of their field, many because they feel useless or technologically obsolescent. Yet by 1985 the U.S. is expected to suffer from a shortage of more than 100,000 engineers. This gap cannot be closed by increasing the output of engineering schools, which are at their production limit. As Ray Stata, president of Analog Devices, told the M.I.T. symposium, "Our only viable strategy for coping is for industry to increase the productivity, retention and competence of those engineers already engaged in the profession."

To this end, the symposium considered a yearlong study by a four-man M.I.T. committee chaired by M.I.T. Professor of Engineering Robert M. Fano. The committee's conclusion: "The problems we are facing cannot be solved simply by incrementally improving and expanding current educational programs. A quantum jump is needed, amounting to a revolution in engineering education." The committee proposed a new alliance between industry and academe under which, on company time and at company expense, engineers would continue their graduate-level education in at least one 15-week course per year. Universities should adopt residency requirements flexible enough so that graduate-level courses could be taught at the workplace. It recommended that as much as 10% of engineers' working time be devoted to continuing education.

At present, joint education projects are sponsored by only a few computer and high-technology firms, including AT&T, Bell Telephone Labs, General Electric, RCA and Wang, and even fewer universities, notably Stanford. The computer and electronics firm Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif, encourages its engineers to take six course hours a week on the firm's time. Says President John Young, "Sure, we lose six hours a week, but in exchange our engineers usually manage to get their job done, and the new knowledge they get from the course will inevitably help." Of course, continuing education for engineers is already stressed by the Japanese, who, it seems, cannot learn enough. Sitting in the audience at M.I.T. last week was none other than Koji Kobayashi, chairman of Japan's Nippon Electric Corp. He took notes.

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