It's probably too late to save engineering in this country. As an aerospace engineer I have seen engineering work dwindling down for more than a decade. Due to limited military programs, engineering failures (rocket booster, NASA), company down sizing & buyouts, lack of new commercial programs,….. The list is long. But primarily the one thing that is killing engineering in the USA is outsourcing. In aerospace engineering has a high overhead cost. The "MBA" solution to reduce company overhead is to hire temp engineers or send the engineering outside the country. Engineers are now like furniture in the eyes of corporate offices that can be bought and disposed of as needed.
As an engineer (with Boeing) I will never be intimately involved with design and manufacturing of a new aircraft again. Instead I will "system integrate" the aircraft. That means I write specifications so that someone else can design and manufacture the end item for Boeing.
Already all the technical writers have been let go and a company Chile now does this function! There is a think tank in Russia that is working on a small passenger aircraft. The same thing is happening in every high tech industry.
There is no future in engineering in this country unless management sees beyond the today's bottom line. But if you are going to succeed in engineering you need to get into management. You need at least an MBA to be competitive. The MBAs have won.
