Engineering Education for the Rest of Us San Francisco State University
******************************** In the high tech world of innovation, start-ups, and venture capital, educational pedigree is everything – particularly in EDA. It’s not a coincidence that CEOs, CTOs, VPs, and founders put their advanced degrees from Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Princeton, Illinois, etc., front and center when speaking to the investment community or the press. If a CEO, CTO, VP or founder doesn’t mention their alma mater, it’s safe bet that the school doesn’t carry the cache needed to open doors and make people sit up and notice. I know all about this. I’ve got a degree from U.C. Berkeley and one from San Francisco State University. I did my graduate work at Stanford. Which one of these names do you think opens the most doors for me? I landed in the engineering program at San Francisco State University in the fall of 1976, fresh from five disastrous years at U.C. Berkeley. Others in their late teens and early twenties may have had the maturity to handle a mega-institution like Cal, but I sure didn’t. I got lost in the crowds as an undergraduate at Berkeley, and in the process lost track of my intellectual abilities and any academic confidence that I may have once had. The faculty and staff at Cal couldn’t have cared less – they didn’t even know I existed. Cal was a huge and impersonal institution back then. Cal’s a huge and impersonal institution today. But don’t get me wrong – I’ll always be a loyal Cal Bear and am fully aware of Berkeley’s status as a world-class university, but I have no illusions about the place. It’s a factory and only the strong survive. After I completed my B.A. in Biophysics at Cal, I went to work full time, hoping to try again by going to school at night at San Francisco State University. I enrolled in the engineering program at SFSU, working days, and attending classes at night. I carried on like that for a year and a half, struggling to save up until I was able to afford to scale back to part-time work and full-time school. By the time I finished my B.S.E. in 1979, I was a new person. Thanks to the efforts of the faculty and the supportive environment at SFSU, I went on to graduate school in EE at Stanford and a job at NASA Ames Research Center. The engineering program at SFSU re-ignited my interest in learning, renewed my self-confidence, and restored my belief in higher education. In those days, students in the Department of Engineering at SFSU were guided by a dedicated faculty who truly cared about them, knew their names, and respected their efforts – both financial and academic – to succeed under often-times challenging circumstances. Today, 25 years later, that’s still the case – with one major difference. The 700 undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled in engineering at SFSU learned this week that the President of the campus is thinking about shutting them down. The President has announced that one quick and dirty way to help meet the budget crisis facing his campus – a crisis echoed across all public institutions in California – is to simply eliminate the entire Department of Engineering. The President’s administration argues that engineering is a costly discipline to teach, one that requires lots of space, lots of labs, and lots of resources. That may be true, but what about an equally valid, alternative perspective? How much more expensive it is not to be teaching engineering – to shut down a functioning, accredited program with more students today than it has ever had? Isn’t it strange that in this day and age when we’re fretting about losing our technical edge to other, more committed societies, that anybody is actually contemplating shutting down an engineering program – especially a program that’s meeting the needs of the students that reside in a different category than the one populated by lucky souls who qualify academically and/or financially for U.C. Berkeley or Stanford? The typical SFSU engineering grad is not the glamour guy in high tech. More likely, he’s practicing his craft in less glitzy private industries like state transportation systems, public utilities, or municipal engineering. In other words, he’s keeping the world that you and I occupy humming. Long-time SFSU EE, Professor V.V. Krishnan, recently told me, "For every one engineer out there doing cutting edge high-tech research, there are 20 engineers out there doing the bread-and-butter engineering that keeps our society functioning. Can we really afford to eliminate the programs that educate those types of engineers?" (Krishnan’s Ph.D. is from Berkeley. Does that help you believe that he knows what he’s talking about?) San Francisco State University sits just a few miles north of the fabled Silicon Valley, a place that likes to position itself as the epicenter of global technology and innovation. These days, millions of dollars from dozens of companies in Silicon Valley are flowing thousands of miles to fund high-tech institutes in far-flung lands. Wouldn’t it be grand if some of those millions of dollars could travel just a few miles due north instead, to help fund a high-tech institute literally on the doorstep of The Valley? If the movers and shakers 50 miles south of San Francisco can’t see clear to assist those in need right here in their own neighborhood, what makes them think they have the proper vision to help the rest of the world? The Department of Engineering at San Francisco State University serves a crucial need in Northern California. Let’s make sure that it continues to function, and continues to play a role as part of one of the great California State Universities. We owe it to ourselves and to our neighborhood. Maybe we owe it to the world. ********************************
Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com
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