PSU Magazine Fall 1996

While Dryden's sojourn in the lab is temporary, it's an apt symbol of the lack of funding and resources that has plagued PSU's School of Engineering in recent years even as demand for engineers in the state has exploded. Oregon is one of only a handful of areas in the country with booming high-tech economies, but because of a lack of commitment from the state, higher education just hasn't been able to respond to the need, according to Dryden. Already, high-tech industries in the area must recruit engineers from outside the state, because Oregon's schools aren't producing enough graduates, he says. Since 1990, when voters passed a tax limitation measure, Oregon has cut higher education funding at a greater rate than any other state. Funding has declined $100 million, while tuition has risen as much as 80 percent. uch cutbacks are "disruptive, inconvenient, and ineffi– cient," says Dryden. "We're not just shooting ourselves in the foot, we're shooting our whole leg off with a cannon." "Rather than looking at higher education as an expense, we need to see it as an investment in the future. This is a decision that will affect the prosper– ity of our state for the next 50 years. Investing in science and engineering programs pays off in the form of high– quality, high paying jobs for people who will be paying taxes their whole careers," he says. "It's the best invest– ment the state can make." In stark contrast to funding in Oregon, the engineering program at the University of Washington has a budget of almost $82 million, compared to the $31.5 million avail– able for engineering programs at PSU and Oregon State University combined. In total per-capita spending on higher education, Washington ranks 17th in the country, while Oregon trails at 38th. o one disagrees that Oregon needs to produce more engi– neers and computer scien– tists to feed the voracious growth of high technology in Oregon. "From 1992 to 1994, the revenue of high-tech firms increased three times faster here than in the rest of the coun– try," says Jim Craven, government affairs manager with the Oregon Council of the American Electronics Association (AEA). "There's no ques– tion we're one of the fastest growing high-tech areas in the country. Look, in the Portland metro area, we're talk– ing about a $10 billion investment in semi-conductor facilities alone. That's a staggering sum of money." In 1995, high-technology companies in Oregon-producers of software, computers, printers, semi-conductors, calculators and telecommunications equipment-surpassed lumber and wood products for the first time to become the largest manufacturing industry in the state, employing some 52,000 workers. Surveys of these companies project growth of more than 50 percent over the next three years. Because about one quarter of these workers are engineers, the expanding industry could easily need several thousand new engineers during this period, according to Craven. "Right now, the state is only producing about 125 electrical engineers a year. Without significant new investment from higher education, there's going to be a huge gap between what we're producing and what's needed," he says. What's happening in Oregon is a sign of "how pervasive technology is going to be in everybody's life in the future," according to Jim Hively, a vice president for LSI Logic, a semi-conduc- tor company whose new plant is under construction in Gresham. "The elec– tronics industry is growing at an expo– nential rate, so it's a tremendous opportunity for creating jobs. We should be putting our best efforts into building a strong base for engineering and link– ing education to local industry." While everyone agrees that applied science programs in Oregon's colleges must be strengthened, agreement on how to go about it is another matter. In June, the Oregon State Board of Higher Education provoked a flurry of protest in the Portland area when it proposed, as part of a series of reforms, that Oregon State University take over PSU's School of Engineering. OSU's program, with more than 100 full-time faculty and some 2,700 students, dwarfs PSU's program with its 47 faculty members and 728 students. For PSU, which has historically struggled to grow in the face of a strong bias toward the larger and older down-state schools, the plan touched a sensitive nerve. PSU's President Judith Ramaley, in a letter to the University community, called the proposals preliminary and in need of much further study, emphasiz– ing her conviction that PSU "must be the principal provider of academic, research, and service-related higher education programs for the metropoli– tan region." n Oregonian editorial suggested that it was prema– ture to start an evaluation for improving higher education in Oregon "with the assumption that the state is better served by removing one program from PSU and downgrading another [business education]." "Portland's largest metropolitan area needs a comprehensive, interdis– ciplinary teaching and research FALL 1996 PSU MAGAZINE 11