Leonard Ferrari is having trouble finding the faculty he needs for his most popular courses, and there’s no relief in sight. A short while ago, the electrical and computer engineering department head at Virginia Tech might have seen his best students stay on after graduation, continue their studies and perhaps become professors themselves. Not today. Graduates with mere bachelor’s degrees can start out making $50,000 or more and can get as many as 10 offers at graduation to work just about anywhere on the globe they want. Staying on in school just isn’t worth it, according to today’s economics. Says Ferrari: "To put four years into a Ph.D. program at a stipend of $20,000 to $25,000 a year, a student will lose thousands, and that’s not even including the stock options."

Leonard Ferrari, head of Tech's electrical and computer engineering department, is losing potential faculty to high-tech companies. Photo courtesy of Virginia Tech

While that may be great for young grads, it presents a big problem for Virginia Tech and other top engineering and technology schools nationwide. The National Science Board in September warned that a continuing decline in admissions for graduate programs in science and engineering may lead to a shortage of skilled workers that could slow down the high-tech locomotive that has been pulling along the U.S. economy at a fast clip.

As more U.S. citizens shun graduate school, international students are filling the ranks. At Tech, about 85 percent of the Ph.D. students in Tech’s electrical engineering department, for example, are international students. Administrators welcome foreign students but at the same time worry that they may not be achieving their goal as a state-funded school turning out engineers to serve the U.S. economy. "I have more than enough international applicants to fill up the department," Ferrari says. "But is that what a state-supported school should do? Lots of these students will stay in the United States, some in Virginia, but how long? And how many years does it take to get our investment back?"

Confronted with these new realities, Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering is taking steps to attract well-qualified domestic students into graduate school. It is taking courses to the state’s highest concentrations of working engineers, creating competitive stipends and supporting private-sector jobs for campus students. Faculty members are being allowed, encouraged even, to entice grad students with work at high-tech start-ups with salaries and stock options while they study in Blacksburg.

One step Virginia Tech has taken is to open a research institute in Northern Virginia, the heart of the Old Dominion’s high-tech powerhouse. Two years ago, the Alexandria Research Institute (ARI) began offering doctorates in engineering and computer science. Northern Virginia is an obvious location because it is home to the nation’s greatest population of high-technology workers. Up until now, however, Northern Virginia has had a major disadvantage. "Unlike the Silicon Valley and Boston, Northern Virginia has no major research university to provide the intellectual capital for innovation and sustain the employment demands of high-tech industry," says ARI Director Saifur Rahman.

Current ARI research focuses on wireless networks, software engineering, microelectronics, industrial systems design, materials and energy systems. The institute’s location provides ready access for collaboration with government research laboratories. "We are up here to accommodate working professionals in our Ph.D. program," Rahman says. "They can go part time for years. Even during the last year, when Ph.D. candidates must be full-time students, they don’t have to uproot their families. Some work part time." To make graduate study more convenient, some employers — Lockheed Martin is one — offer Tech courses on the job site. Other industries and agencies fund research at ARI. Nearly 200 students are taking graduate classes part time through ARI, including Noor Maricar, who prefers the opportunities to attend conferences and seminars in the metropolitan area.

To attract graduate students, Virginia Tech is reaching out to the Hampton Roads area as well. Together with the College of William and Mary, Old Dominion University and the University of Virginia, Tech has created a consortium to offer graduate engineering and science studies to residents of the Virginia Peninsula. Students take classes at the Consortium Center in Hampton, which may be televised, or live lectures by faculty members from consortium universities or adjunct faculty from NASA, Newport News Shipbuilding and elsewhere. All classes are offered in the late afternoon or evening. More than 30 students are enrolled in Ph.D. courses including mechanical, materials science, aerospace and ocean engineering, and engineering science, mechanics and applied science.

Meanwhile, Tech is trying another ploy to attract graduate students: It hopes to generate more buzz about Tech’s reputation. "The primary reason graduate students we survey choose Tech is the quality of our programs and the reputation of individual faculty members," says Len Peters, vice provost for research and dean of the graduate school. The College of Engineering has ranked in the top 25 for years and the entire university is 47th in National Science Foundation ratings, but Malcolm McPherson, College of Engineering associate dean for research and graduate studies, says that’s not good enough. "Our goal is to put Tech in the top 30; in order for the university to be there, the College of Engineering must be in the top 10," he says. "Business as usual won’t work anymore. We’ll need a whole new way of doing business to boost our research funding."

To get there, McPherson is pushing something he describes as "organized research units" that bring faculty and non-teaching research professionals together to explore topics in broad areas such as biomedical engineering, power electronics, sensors, communications, microelectronics and other areas. The units would offer technical assistance to Virginia companies, produce spinoff companies and provide research opportunities for graduate students. Working with local economic development authorities, they will try to attract new companies where full-time career researchers, free of academic constraints, would be able to compete for the larger research contracts. The University of California Berkeley’s Earthquake Engineering Center has been conducting research in this manner for 33 years. "Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech and other schools are also already doing this," McPherson says.

Tech also needs to beef up its engineering facilities, including labs, if it wants to stay competitive with other universities, he says. "With the exception of our new engineering building, most of our buildings are more than 30 years old. Some of our research labs need more up-to-date equipment," he says.

McPherson says Tech must quickly claim its territory as a research powerhouse. "We’re not going to stay in the top 25 with our current efforts," he says. "A few top universities will have wide influence. Tech is on the brink of moving upwards or falling back. We can go either way."

The college is also implementing an aggressive recruitment campaign, allotting an additional $50,000 per year to the department’s efforts to bring in potential graduate students for weekend recruitment blitzes where they meet key faculty and explore the facilities. Tech administrators, however, worry that they can’t rely on reputation alone, not when urban centers offer students better part-time work. One way to get them to Tech’s mountain home is to create the same kind of monetary enticements, such as salaries and stock options, that they might get at technology companies in less remote parts of the state. Electrical engineering professor Ted Rappaport, for example, is not concerned about the reputation of Tech’s wireless communications program for attracting students. "We’re on the radar screen in the world and nation," he says. "But how do we get them to move to Blacksburg?" Rappaport sees one solution in his start-up company, Wireless Valley, that pays market-rate salaries to entrepreneurial-minded students (see Page 74).

With work demands, these employed students will probably be able to handle a load of only one or two graduate courses a semester. But they have the advantage of working with Rappaport, who has written the most popular textbooks in the field. "Dissertation and thesis topics are floating all over Wireless Valley," Rappaport says. Right now the 2-year-old company employs a staff of 12, but Rappaport expects that number to double within a year. Eventually, Rappaport hopes to take Wireless Valley public with an IPO and create 400 to 500 jobs in the region within the decade. "This is a pioneering program at Virginia Tech to try to spawn major high-tech job growth in our back yard," he says.

Associate Dean McPherson agrees with the initiative: "We should be offering $40,000 to $50,000 to master’s students working on Ph.D.s, and that’s not likely to come from sponsored research or institutional funds."

Looking for another way to attract domestic graduate students, engineering professor Scott Midkiff has found a way to offer attractive financial packages to worthy students. A proposal he recently made to the National Science Foundation recently won Tech $2.55 million to recruit and support up to 20 Ph.D. students a year through a novel education program that emphasizes communication and teamwork skills. The multidisciplinary research will focus on advanced networking topics, including broadband wireless access, mobile access to Internet resources, Internet appliances, network security and management of large-scale networks. "We’re looking at interacting with international scholars and developing new technologies here — something that an engineer doesn’t usually do in industry without a Ph.D.," Midkiff says.

Through the NSF’s Integrated Research and Education in Advanced Networks program, Tech will have funding for three-year assistantships. Through cost sharing with Virginia Tech’s existing Bradley Fellowships, Ph.D. stipends of almost $30,000 will be competitive with other universities. A recent national survey of graduate stipends at peer institutions across the nation shows Tech only lagging slightly, with average graduate stipends across disciplines of $18,000 to $21,000 for the academic year. However, Midkiff concedes, that’s not enough to lure money-minded students away from industry.

Bigger stipends are part of the solution, but Ferrari also would like to create opportunities to provide students an entrepreneurial experience. "Even with more money for stipends, we may still be just competing with other schools for the same small pool of potential graduate students," he says. "We need to create an environment for more entrepreneurial minded students — those who want to participate in the economy, not just make money."

Teresa Duffy, dean of enrollment management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., agrees. "Even at an excellent engineering school, you just can’t lure a 22-year-old with unlimited earning potential into graduate school by offering a larger than normal stipend," she says. "We’re seeing great success by emphasizing our entrepreneurship possibilities." RPI’s highly rated engineering school, like that of Stanford, has an incubator center where students get help converting university technology into successful businesses.

Ferrari is frustrated that no one outside of academia seems to be concerned about the declining numbers of engineering Ph.D.s. "We’re overbooked teaching computer engineering courses already, but the companies continue to want young graduates. Industry thinks in a different time frame — next quarter’s earnings." The lack of engineering professors won’t affect industry for a few years, he says.

For all the challenges, Tech’s formula seems to be working. The college graduated 90 engineering Ph.D.s last year, a 21 percent increase from the year before, ending a three-year decline. Tech’s far-flung programs are making advanced study easier for engineers working in Virginia’s main high-tech clusters. While the university can’t compete with industry salarywise for the pool of potential students and professors, building highly rated programs, focusing on research and spurring entrepreneurship helps it vie with other universities.