A few facts to start out with. The baby boom started in 1942 and was in full bloom in 1945. Kids born in 1942 were 18 years old in 1960 when our colleges and universities were over run with kids wanting to become engineers and scientists. The boomer kids going into engineering hit their peak in about 1980, only 20 years after the big boom in engineering had started. The actual number of engineering graduates started to decline in absolute numbers in 1986 and has kept going down. The net affect of all this is that we had a boom in engineering graduates like the USA or most of the world had never seen before. In 1986, we had a workforce of engineers who had graduated between 1940 and 1986. Most were young and under 40 years old, but they were all aging fast. In 2000 many of the 60 year old engineers who were born in 1940 started to retire. There was a strong trend to retire earlier and earlier, since many had made good money and had large net worths. Why keep working? Have fun and buy that second home and many did just that. Now what is the bottom line of all this? In 2011, it has been 25 years since the absolute number of engineering graduates started going down. Over a period of 25 years, that has created a large short fall of engineers in the work force. Now add this to the fact that the boomer engineers are retiring at record rates and you have the recipe for a total technical collapse of the economic system that had created much of the wealth of the past 50 years. 40% of our high school kids drop out and don't graduate and many of our kids who do go on to college take courses and degrees that are next to worthless.
We have a serious problem and the cure will take at least 25 years to come out of it if that is even possible given the degree of world wide competition. To catch up, we have to first stop falling farther behind and only then can we have a chance of catching up. The rest of the world is not waiting for us to catch up. All of our kids who are punching keys and texting are doing so on computers that are being built some where else. When they run out of their parents money, they are not going to be able to eat those cell phones. It is like a tornado bearing down on us and most of us don't even know it.
