A Terrific Bargain

I have just read Steve Reno’s article (“The Labor Gap,” July 2010) in Seattle
Business magazine.

I recently participated in the admissions process for UW
Electrical Engineering for students who will enter our program in
Autumn 2010. There were about 320 applications for admission, and we
made 120 offers. We expect about
95 to accept (a very high yield, indicating the strong demand for Electrical
Engineering).

Before posing the following rhetorical question, let me
add the factoid that retention (how many students who enter Engineering
complete their degrees) is very high 95 percent or better.

The interesting question is this: How many of the 200
students we turned down could have made it through our program? The answer is
disheartening: all of them.

However, we recently had to lay off several instructors,
staff, and take other cost cutting measures to keep our Electrical Engineering
program solvent, and try to tackle the critical tradeoff between Quality and
Quantity. This is not an abstract
tradeoff, as we do have to preserve and defend our ABET accreditation.

The annual (UW) Budget for Electrical Engineering is
about $7 million, while the total budget is closer to $25 million (when you include the
external research funding). We have been generating over 170 B.S., 60 M.S. and 35
Ph.D. degrees each year, which results in about $15 million in new salaries each year,
and factoring in a (modest) 20 year career, that $7 million investment drives a $300 million
economic engine.

The sales tax generated by that $7 million investment generates
about $15 million in new taxes. The
additional $22 million drives considerable additional economic activity (employing
postdocs and grad students, procuring equipment, etc.), but I’ll ignore that
funding stream completely.

That is an extremely conservative estimate based upon the
salaries of brand new engineers, and counts for none of the ancillary benefits
(the support staff around engineers, the intellectual property, the effect on
property values, the property taxes, etc.). The actual value could easily be two or three times what I
have suggested, given the salaries that experienced engineers draw.

Viewed in this light, society gets a return on investment
that is something well north of 100 percent per year, by investing in UW Electrical
Engineering. Anyone else who promised 100 percent per year ROI would be immediately
suspect of a Ponzi scheme. But UW Electrical Engineering has been churning out
the real goods for decades.

I understand that there are real difficulties in the state budget, and I realize that, at first blush, the UW may look expensive.
But in fact, the UW is a terrific bargain, which is, alas, becoming less and
less accessible to many, including the vanishing middle class.

John D. Sahr is a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington.