Puppets in the paper

Have they rented a certain amount of page space from the N&O, or what?

North Carolina is trying to prepare for the future economy by putting recommendations from Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton's JOBS (Joining Our Businesses and Schools) Commission into practice. Two bills that Gov. Bev Perdue recently signed into law come directly from the commission's report.

Unfortunately, the JOBS Commission recommendations - and therefore the new laws - are based on false assumptions and unrealistic projections.

Here we go again: dueling studies about the value of studies, all in the interest of partisan politics.

One of the researchers Jay Schalin references in his rebuttal of the need for more engineers said this four years ago:

Vivek Wadhwa, who founded two software companies and is now the director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, wrote in 2006 that, while "university deans, business executives and political leaders" were calling for the country to double its production of engineers, "if you analyze the data, there doesn't seem to be any indication of a general shortage of engineers."

Of course, the same professor had this to say just last year:

More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home, raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields.

"What was a trickle has become a flood," says Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration.

Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth.

"For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced," he says.

While Schalin sees fit to bash Lt. Governor Dalton's Commission for not asking the right experts for their opinion, he himself fails to ask those who can best determine the need for STEM graduates: business leaders who desperately want to hire them:

For the second year in a row, engineer is the hardest job to fill in America.

Why are engineers so hard to find? "We have whole generations of people loving liberal arts, not going into science and math," says Larry Jacobson, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers.

"Companies are looking to replace more than half of their engineers over the next eight years, because baby boomers are retiring," Jacobson says. "When you have 80,000 engineers working for you, as Lockheed Martin does, that's a lot of jobs." He says that even if every single seat in the nation's engineering schools is filled, that's only 75,000 engineers being trained annually. That won't come close to making up the shortage. Engineering is a field that requires years of experience before you take on major responsibility. It's one thing to learn the theory of building a bridge or a tunnel in school, but it's quite another to have decades of work at it behind you.

Of course, you won't find any reference to these surveys in Schalin's piece, because that won't help Pope's minions tear down the Democratic-controlled state government.