Special Reports
AMIE: Making the Corporate Connection
By Roger Witherspoon
Sep 7, 2006, 17:10
To Charles Martin, director of engineering education and college liaison for the Raytheon Company, it is the number of engineering graduates-not their color-which are most compelling. “This isn’t about affirmative action. It’s not even close to that. There are currently 3,000 African Americans graduating from engineering schools. A company like mine is looking to hire something in excess of 14,000 engineers alone this year.
“There is a tremendous demand for engineering graduates. To the extent that we want to build a diverse work force for business reasons, we look at where the diversity is, and where it is lagging in the pipeline, and work to change it.”
”Just look at the new degrees,” says Dr. Eugene Deloatch, dean of the School of Engineering at Morgan State University. “The best estimate is that there will be 90,000 graduates this year: That’s 65,000 bachelor’s, 20,000 master’s, and 5,000 PhDs.
”Half the PhDs are non-citizens, and though some will stay here and work, most of those will be returning to their home countries. With the engineer’s getting master’s degrees, a significant number of those are already employed, further cutting down the numbers of new workers in the field. And many of those obtaining their bachelor’s degrees are going on to graduate school.
”When you look at the mix, you understand the challenge we have in putting out talent from the engineering colleges who will meet the demands of the workplace. If just one person in this small group needs 14,000 engineers, you know how big the demand is and how hard it is to meet it. There is a crunch for quality talent, and it’s a challenge to produce it.”
Martin and Deloatch are among the 14 members of the executive board of AMIE (Advancing Minorities Interest in Engineering), who recently gathered in Chicago to discuss their ongoing programs. AMIE is an enterprise of Fortune 150 companies and the nine historically Black engineering schools, which share resources to increase the pool of minorities in the engineering field.
The corporations contribute membership fees of up to $10,000 annually, and provide thousands of dollars in additional support for various AMIE programs aimed at retaining Blacks in engineering schools and interesting qualified high-school students in the pursuit of engineering degrees.
EDS, for example, also provides and executive on loan, Marvin Bembry, who works full-time promoting AMIE programs among the nation’s leading corporations. AMIE grew out of a discussion between Abbott Laboratories Vice President Dan Streubel and Lucius Walker, then dean of the Howard University School of Engineering, at the 1991 Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference.
According to Bembry, “They began talking about the possibility of an industry-academic collaboration with the historically Black colleges and universities so they could do a better job of producing Black engineers.
“That would give companies like Abbott a larger pool to draw from so they could do more about their lack of diversity and their need for more engineers. Streubel’s vision was that this was more than just an Abbott problem. He wondered what would happen if a number of major corporations could coalesce around this issue and coordinate our efforts instead of just one corporation trying to make a difference."
Streubel and the deans of the Black engineering schools invited representatives of the Fortune 50 to a meeting in 1992 to discuss forming a new organization representing organizations and historically Black colleges and universities to work on this issue, says Bembry. The meeting grew in 1993 to include firms on the Fortune 150 list, and AMIE evolved from that conference.
Andrew Crowe, the current chairman of AMIE and director of supplier diversity for Eli Lilly and Company, said at the board meeting that his company does not regard the contributions to AMIE programs as “extra funds” spent on minority recruitment.
“We consider it a synergistic approach towards increasing the pipeline of minority engineers for both the public and private sector.” He said. “And it is a way for our company to be involved in the educational process to create the type of talented engineers we need in the pharmaceutical industry.”
Lance Wyatt, vice president for corporate engineering at Abbott Laboratories, added, “We look at pre-college initiatives and ways of getting involved early in the educational process and help structure programs for both recruitment and retention.”
Crowe added “We think of it as a long-term effort. There is a not a quick fix or a silver bullet. We have programs, which will help identify students even before they are in the university. This is a long-term effort that we are all committed to.’ That type of effort is necessary if there are to be significant increases in the numbers of minority engineers in the work force of the future.
Though the demand for trained engineers is at an all-time high, studies released last month by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) indicate that there has been a decline over the past five years in the numbers of minorities enrolled in engineering programs. NACME’s last report, covering the 1996-97 academic year, states that the number of minority freshman decreased by 3.5 percent, from 14,101 in the 1995-96 academic year to 13,605 last year.
In an accompanying statement, NACME president, Dr. George Campbell Jr. said, “minority engineering enrollment peaked in 1992-93, producing record numbers of graduating engineers in 1996-97. However, freshman enrollment has declined almost 10 percent since that time.
“This means we can expect sharp decreases in minority engineering graduates in the 1998-2000 time frame. When you consider that the United States currently has 200,000 unfilled jobs in information technology, and that new engineering graduates earn starting salaries that far outstrip those offered to business and liberal-arts graduates, it’s amazing that we cannot educate a wider segment of our students to fill a genuine national need.”
AMIE board member Don Guthrie, director of the Strategic Support Unit of EDS, says, “We need to develop top engineering talent, and that talent comes in many different colors. If minorities are not given the opportunity to develop and showcase the talent, we are all losers."
There is an argument sometimes made at share holder meetings that corporate funds should be used to maximize profits and boost the returns to shareholders-and that if these individuals want to support AMIE and its programs, then that’s their own decision to make as individuals. But Crowe responds that, “If we didn’t have good people to do the work we have, we wouldn’t have any money to return to our shareholders anyway. There is a tremendous shortage of qualifies people coming out of college. There is a very critical need for top technical talent.
”When the total society has been able to play, the results have always been better than when only certain selected groups or segments can contribute. This isn’t about affirmative action. It’s about building resources for our business."
This article first appeared in the 1998 July/August edition of US Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine