WASHINGTON - In what could be an encouraging sign of change in the long-standing shortage of American students preparing for hi-tech careers, the hottest subject on college campuses across the nation seems to be renewable energy — a surge of interest largely stimulated by the specter of global warming.

Concern about climate change is apparently galvanizing more undergraduate students to turn toward a subject involving science and engineering, some educators suggest, in much the same way that Moscow’s launching of the Sputnik space satellite jolted baby boomers to turn their eyes to the stars.

What remains uncertain is whether enthusiasm for the science and technology of renewable energy sources will carry over into graduate school and swell the ranks of Americans with advanced degrees in such subjects.”We have a shortfall of people to do cutting-edge research and do the innovations we need,” said Vijay K. Dhir, dean of the engineering school at the University of California, Los Angeles. But, he added, “The potential is there.”

The rising interest in renewable energy is so new that it’s not clearly reflected in the latest enrollment figures, educators say. But leaders from a range of schools­- including Arizona State University, Indiana University and the University of Colorado - say energy and sustainability are the hottest topics for their students.

President Barack Obama is mounting a multibillion-dollar push to boost “clean energy,” in hopes of creating millions of domestic jobs. The effort includes stepped-up support for graduate students doing research in the area.
At the White House last week, he told a group of academics and energy entrepreneurs that “innovators like you are creating the jobs that will foster our recovery.”

The United States has struggled in the past two decades, however, to produce enough home-grown scientists and engineers to meet demand.

Enrollment in U.S. graduate engineering programs dropped more than 5 percent from 2003 to 2005, the last year for which statistics are available. At the same time, rapidly developing countries, such as China and South Korea, have ramped up their graduate engineering programs, in size and quality.

Graduate science enrollment overall in the United States nearly doubled in the last two decades. But the programs are now more than half-filled with foreign students who increasingly leave the country upon graduation.
Aggravating the dearth of newly minted engineers, the rate at which American workers with science and engineering skills retire is expected to triple over the next decade.

If that trend continues, the National Science Board warned in a 2008 report, “the rapid growth in R&D employment and spending that the United States has experienced since World War II may not be sustainable.” Business leaders are equally blunt. “The most critical challenge over the long-term is people and brainpower,” said Karen Harbert, who runs the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

Obama hopes massive federal spending will help. His signature stimulus package includes $20 billion to support the basic and applied science research — much of it done by graduate students — that could yield cheaper solar cells more efficient wind turbines and longer-lasting batteries.

His budget would eventually triple the number of federally supported graduate student fellowships.
The increased interest among students may also reflect developments over the last few years that have raised the profile of global warming.And the nation’s economic problems may be contributing to the trend.

“In the past, very talented kids would go into business school, to Wall Street, get big bonuses,” said Yannis C. Yortsos, the engineering dean at the University of Southern California. “That may not be the case for a while. They may go into engineering instead.”

Yortsos has seen a rapid rise of freshman and graduate-student interest in renewable energy research. It’s driven, he says, by a “social awareness” of sustainability issues and climate change.

Students agree. “I became an engineer because of alternative energy and the potential it had” to solve problems, said Loni Iverson, 21, a mechanical engineering senior at USC, who is assisting a professor’s research into fuel cells that run on bacteria. “In high school, I kept hearing about America’s dependence on foreign oil and the war in Iraq and gas prices rising.”

Graduate research often leads to patents, which often lead to start-up companies and, sometimes, major industries. Economists have shown strong links between patent production and economic growth.

source: Pine Log