The lack of good graduate students is critical--especially a few years down the line when we will need to dramatically increase the number of engineers that we are educating.

Forty or more years ago, when I was in the MBA program at U.C., Berkeley, we had a number of engineers in the program. They were tired of being second class citizens and wanted to move up into management, where they would get more money and a lot more respect.

During the first half of the twentieth century engineers had a lot of status, and many boys (and a few girls) dreamed about becoming engineers; they were the heroes of science fiction stories in the forties and the fifties. Indeed, "Astounding Science Fiction" was written largely by, for, and about engineers in an exciting future.

But since the end of the sixties, finance and law have been the prestige areas--as a result of which we have hundreds of thousands of useless parasitic lawyers and similar numbers of MBAs in finance; these are the people who drove great banks and brokerage houses into the ground.

My guess is that we will have to import huge numbers of engineers, because we are not producing anywhere near enough of them in the U.S.