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Gen. Spence (Sam) M. Armstrong, NASA Headquarters
Coalition of the Concerned for the Vitality of the
Science and Engineering Workforce
As a result of the October 2001 Government-University-Industry Re-
search Roundtable (GUIRR) session on SUE workforce issues there was a
consensus among many of the attendees that some further work needed to
be done prior to the next (GUIRR) session in the spring. I took the initiative
to contact some of the individuals who had expressed an interest in work-
ing the issue. Representatives from the following organizations agreed to
participate in what we later termed "The Coalition of the Concerned about
the Future of the U.S. SHE Workforce": Department of Defense (DOD),
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Science Foun-
dation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Transpor-
tation (DOT), Department of Energy (DOE), National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST), NASA, Boeing, QUALCOMM, and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). The GUIRR hosted a luncheon for the Coali-
tion in lanuary where the initial planning occurred.
It was decided that the Coalition needed to sharpen its focus on what
might be done so as to get some action going. The consensus of the Coali-
tion was that the most immediate impact would be to somehow decrease
the dropout rate of undergraduate science and engineering majors. Each
of the federal participants was asked to develop a two-page summary of
two of their programs that they thought was effective in decreasing the
dropout rate. Interestingly enough, the agencies realized that they were
not always aware of the efforts of other agencies, so this initial task shed
some light on the issue. A summary of the Coalition's activities was pre-
sented at the March 2002 GUIRR session.
~$
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Other organizations were discovered to have similar interests, and
they were invited to participate in the Coalition. They were Office of Sci-
ence and Technology Policy, Office of Personnel Management, Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), Project Kaleidoscope, BEST, The Sloan
Foundation, The National Bureau of Economic Research, and Space Day
Foundation. In subsequent luncheons (4) and telecoms (2), other sugges-
tions surfaced. One was that internships had been proven to decrease the
dropout rate of undergraduates. They gave the undergraduates an oppor-
tunity to do some "hands on" work. Plus, working with a scientist or an
engineer provided a mentoring environment.
Some research was undertaken to determine how readily available
these internship opportunities were to undergraduates. Some success was
achieved using Google and Yahoo!, but it was recognized that some
agency opportunities were not reachable via these major search engines.
This research was done by a NASA summer intern who compiled a four-
page list of URLs that contained internship opportunities and that were
deemed to be only a partial inventory. Several members of the Coalition
and GUIRR visited the Employment Services Division of OPM to see if
they could be of assistance.
The visit resulted in a presentation at the September luncheon by OPM
on the posting capabilities that they had. Their USA.IOBS site that auto-
matically listed every federal job posting was heavily accessed. By com-
parison, the site where they posted student opportunities such as intern-
ship was very lightly accessed. This difference was explained by the fact
that agencies were responsible for submitting these opportunities and they
were not keeping their listings current. OPM was asked by the Coalition
to take a more active part by eventually creating a Web portal that listed
every opportunity, not just the federal ones.
The Coalition is in recess until the results of the Summit are known.
The role of the Coalition from that point forward will then be determined.
It could conceivably be greatly enlarged by the inclusion of Summit par-
ticipants. It could also take on a more intense set of activities, again de-
pending on the Summit output.
I have concluded that there are many great initiatives across the coun-
try that are important in working on the SHE issues. BEST calls them "Ex-
emplars." However, the fact is that we are still experiencing a decline in
the production of U.S. citizens in the physical sciences and engineering
despite these noble efforts. Given this situation, how do we make a more
significant impact across the country? My recommendation is that we do
a systems engineering analysis of the SHE education function at all levels.
This will be difficult because there are so many subsystems involved. For
instance, there is a motivational subsystem and an economic cycle sub-
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PAN-~CANIZAHONAL SUMMIT
system, and it will not be easy to determine how these subsystems might
affect the others within the overall system.
With a systems engineering analysis completed a model can be con-
structed. It is unlikely that the model can have the fidelity associated with
the systems engineering of the International Space Station, for example, but
the premise is that an analysis based upon qualitative judgments is better
than no analysis at all. All of the initiatives, surely including the "Exem-
plars," would be fed into the model. The metrics developed with the model
will identify the overall impact of each initiative on the subsystems and the
overall system, which should provide decision makers at all levels with an
understanding of where more effort will have an impact.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
dropout rate
