america is pretty much the world capital when it comes to engineering education. nobody on the planet can really compete with burgerland. MIT, bell labs, etc completely outclass the rest of the world.
Not really.
Don’t get me wrong, does America have fine engineering schools? Sure.
But an engineer isn’t just an engineer.
You can’t swap out an electronics engineer or electric engineer with a production engineer.
And the latter ones: Production engineers are the ones you need to run factories.
In China, over 1,5 million engineers graduate every year. Many of them are the kind of low level engineers needed to build and run factories.
America hasn’t created production engineers in numbers anywhere close to that for decades. Because the jobs just weren’t there.
american educated engineers have been the driving force behind technology on a global scale for decades. TSMC founder morris chang for example was an MIT and stanford educated electrical engineer who worked for texas instruments before being approached by the taiwanese government to kickstart their semiconductor industry.
Yes. That was back in the glory days of American manufacturing. Today, all those fabs are primarily in Asia.
And shit, when they started throwing money at TSMC and Samsung to build (non leading node) fabs in the US, they couldn’t even build the fabs on time and on budget. Because engineering, like manufacturing has been hollowed out for decades.
Just look at shipbuilding. 90% of the worlds commercial ships are built in China and Korea. Less than 1% are built in America.
Graduating a ton of people and giving them degrees isn't the same as educating them. That's why we're in this mess.
It’s also about having the right kind of graduates.
You don’t need someone with studied electronic engineering for six years to run a factory. You need a production engineer who either worked his way up, or has a 3-4 year long bachelor degree in production engineering.
America hasn’t created enough of those for decades because the jobs weren’t there.
