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Contents
Why We Have To Import Scientists
Saul Fenster On How To Educate Workers For A High-Tech World
New Jersey Institute of Technology Reacts to Sept. 11 Attacks
How To Give Techies What They Want
IBM Executive Discusses At NJIT Key Trends, Shifts In World Of Computing
Safety Tips For Mail Deliveries
Why We Have to Import Scientists
An article by Varghese Joseph, Business News of New Jersey, October 23, 2001
Companies hire skilled employees from abroad because New Jersey does not educate enough of them Deek instructing students
An underground movement has been trying to change the state's slogan from the Garden State to the Innovation Garden State. But despite its historic contributions to innovation, the state faces a monumental shortage of high-tech workers. Take u1.net, a Web and network integration company in Marlton, for example, where 25 of the 60 employees are foreign.
"The U.S. has a lot of people with the high-tech skills we need," says Clifford Mingle, vice president of human resources at Oki Data Americas, a Mount Laurel manufacturer and distributor of computer printers and multi-functional machines that is a subsidiary of the huge Japanese company. "But they are either in California or elsewhere in the country. We try to find the best from among those available, and that cuts across all lines in terms of people's backgrounds." Oki Data employs 500 people in New Jersey, of whom 35 are foreign nationals.
One major reason for this shortage, according to experts, is New Jersey's education system. "The state is behind the times when it comes to technology education requirements, standards and certification," says SaraLee Pindar, director of the New Jersey Technology Council Education Foundation in Mount Laurel.
Technology education is not required in New Jersey schools or universities. Some districts offer it in elective courses. The New Jersey State Board of Education approved the current Core Curriculum Content Standards in 1996 for a period of five years. It includes seven areas of study required for graduation: visual and performing arts; comprehen-sive health and physical education; language arts literacy; mathematics; science; social studies; and foreign languages.
As a result, the number of local students going into higher education in high-tech fields is low. According to the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, fewer than 9% of the 5,877 Ph.Ds awarded in the U.S. in 1998 were to engineering graduates, and of those 57.1% were to foreign nationals. In New Jersey, only 119 students received Ph.Ds in engi-neering, just 2% of the national total.
Even more pathetic was the number of doctorates awarded to female graduates--just 20, which is 0.3 % of the national total. "This is partly an indication of a bias in the education system," says John Karsnitz, professor and chair of the department of technological studies in the School of Engineering at The College of New Jersey in Ewing. "We call ourselves the invention state, but we do nothing with invention or innovation studies in our K-through-12 programs."
One of the biggest impediments to technology education in New Jersey, says Fadi Deek, associate dean for the College of Computing Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, is that many high school students graduate without taking appropriate levels of science and mathematics. As a result, they are faced with the need to take remediation courses before starting their majors.
"Students coming from foreign countries, especially those from Europe and Asia, have better backgrounds and can, therefore, progress more quickly through the curriculum in disciplines requiring mathematics and the sciences," Deek says.
Pindar agrees: "There is no point in studying engineering unless your level of maths is high. What happens is that people get into college and then have to spend a lot of time learning the subject."
Students here are not motivated to learn mathematics and science, says Dimple Patel, database administrator at Chubb Institute in Parsippany. "I was born and brought up in Mumbai, India, where we had to learn certain courses for the year," Patel says. "It all helps in the end. If your fundamentals are strong, you can put up with anything."
Ron Guida, the CEO of U1.net, says the New Jersey curriculum fails to stress expanding creativity in problem solving. "If you look at some of the great people like Edison or Rockefeller, they didn't have a lot of advanced degrees," he says. "They had a very creative approach to solving problems, and that seems to be something that schools tend to program out of their students."
According to Deek, the teaching of science, computing, and engineering needs to be reinvented at the high school level to enable students to see the practicality of these subjects and to provide them with hands-on experience.
Are schools solely responsible for the situation? No, says Pindar. Fewer students in a field means that society does not hold those fields in high esteem.
"In countries like India and Korea, students learn computer sciences and engineering, and it is regarded as something very worthy," says Pindar. "Here in the U.S., there is still a perception that technologists and scientists are nerds or geeks."
Karsnitz, who represents The College of New Jersey on the Technology Educators Association of New Jersey, cites another reason for the problem: a shortage of certified technology teachers. In most elementary schools, he says, 80% to 90% of teachers have social science backgrounds.
The reason for this, he believes, is the lack of technology education standards in the New Jersey State Core Curriculum. Technology is scattered throughout the core curriculum, and at no point do the standards address the entire body of knowledge of technology education. Also, there is no standard license for a teacher of technology available in New Jersey, he notes. Teachers who are currently teaching technology programs in New Jersey are doing so with an Industrial Arts or other license.
There is hope, however. Many New Jersey teachers have either already passed the Educational Testing Service Praxis exam in technology education, or are ready to take the test. Further, many of New Jersey's 2,000 industrial arts teachers need only one or two continuing education courses to prepare them for the exam and thus for a technology education license.
Another welcome change is the growing involvement of businesses in designing the educational curriculum at some of the state's private technical schools. The Chubb Institute, for instance, designs its programs with input from ad-visory boards made up of employers from the area where the schools are located.
Chubb has 11 schools scattered across the country with four campuses in New Jersey-Parsippany, Cherry Hill, Jersey City and North Brunswick.
"We call our curriculum full immersion," says Chubb CEO David Fowler. "These are courses lasting eight to nine months that help people get immersed in certain technologies. They include project work, case studies and more. Students are then able to apply those skills once they get into the job market."
The trend is to involve students early in the real-world problems they will encouter as industry employees. "We are getting there at the college level," says Deek, "but we are not yet there at the pre-college level."
The following article was reprinted with permission from Business News of New Jersey.
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