Does academia have a chip on its shoulder?

London – “It doesn’t make any difference whether a country makes potato chips or computer chips!” Michael Boskin, a leading economist and US government advisor once said.

The quote was cited by by Robert Atkinson, president of Washington, DC-based think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, during his keynote presentation at Rockwell’s recent Automation Fair 2011 (RA’11) in Chicago.

Atkinson’s point was that - despite today’s economic mayhem - governments still see the financial and service sectors, rather than industry, as the way ahead. Lawmakers, he suggested, remain much more inclined to listen to economists, like Boskin, than engineers or scientists.

These attitudes seem to have rubbed off on educational leaders in schools, colleges and universities, according to speakers at a subsequent RA’11 panel discussion on skills shortages in industry.

“In the US, working with educational establishments is often a challenge,” said Dr. Tom Duesterberg, an executive director at the Aspen Institute. “Even if you bring money and students, they don’t want to put programmes in place because they don’t think there is a future in these areas.”

Across the Atlantic, an international discussion panel on skills at Honeywell’s EMEA user group meeting in Bavena, Italy, identified a lack of industry readiness among young people coming into industry as a major symptom of this problem.

Grahm Philp of UK automation industry group GAMBICA, said graduates are coming out of universities without the right problem-solving capabilities or communication skills needed in industry. Better collaboration between industry and academia, he said, one way to put matters right.

However with - as another RA’11 speaker put it - “a real inertial barrier” to teaching kids technology at many educational establishments, progress on this front is likely to be slow.

(A full report covering both panel discussions will appear in Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Process Engineering magazine.)