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Thursday, June 24, 2010 Raytheon CEO Swanson urges STEM education commitment By Kyle Alspach
The U.S. must act now to develop more young talent in science, technology and engineering, as a �matter of national security,� Raytheon Co. CEO Bill Swanson said during an address Tuesday morning.
Swanson spoke to several hundred at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston as part of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Executive Forum. The CEO of Waltham-based Raytheon since 2003, Swanson focused the address on educational issues that impact the defense industry.
The U.S., he said, has fallen behind other parts of the world in engaging and equipping young people for careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Only four percent of college students expected to graduate next year are majoring in one of those fields, with 1.6 percent in engineering, Swanson said.
�The frightening part is I can name five companies that will hire a third of all those graduates, us being one of them,� he said, later saying that Raytheon hires 4,500 engineers a year.
Raytheon is taking its own approach to the issue � putting 60 percent of its corporate giving toward educational purposes, Swanson said. The company has also developed the U.S. STEM Education Model, a system dynamics model, which predicts the impacts of educational policy decisions.
�This is not a way to implement policy, but a way to check policy decisions,� Swanson said.
Raytheon and the Business-Higher Education Forum coalition, which Raytheon has gifted the model to, are using the model to find ways to increase the number of graduates in STEM fields, he said.
Swanson called on government and education leaders to see the need for more engineers and scientists as a national security issue, and to act accordingly by making bold moves.
One thing that needs to change: teachers in STEM fields and teachers in other fields � history and literature, for example � can�t be paid the same salaries, according to Swanson. STEM teachers have to be paid more to be competitive with industry, he said.
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The need for NAPS or something like it is huge. Politicians from the President on down through Congress along with the top businesspeople in American industry know this, but still nothing seems to be getting done.
I recently wrote letters introducing NAPS to President Barack Obama and to Dr. John P. Holdren, who is advisor to President Obama for Science and Technology and who is Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and is Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Also, I recently wrote a letter introducing NAPS to Raytheon Co. CEO Bill Swanson.
