Over 50 companies will double their engineering internships in order to train more people for math and science jobs.
Over 50 companies will double their engineering internships in order to train more people for math and science jobs, President Obama’s jobs and competitiveness council announced.
The commitment from high-tech, health care, financial and other companies creates about 6,300 new engineering internships. It’s part of a short-term goal to graduate 10,000 more American engineers each year, bringing the total to about 130,000 annual graduates.
Obama’s competitiveness council hopes the new internships will help engineering schools improve abysmal retention rates. Forty percent of science and math majors drop out, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.
Some high-tech companies would like to hire engineers in the United States but are exporting jobs to Asia because of a shortage of qualified Americans, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.
“We need engineers. We need scientists,” Chu said. “This is going to be at the heart of how the United States is going to remain competitive.”
Read more at The Register-Guard.
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