Technical degrees lacking, panel says

Panelists from business, banking, venture funding and government had varied opinions about a few topics at Tuesday's Rocky Mountain Economic Summit, but they agreed on one thing: Utah's education system is failing to meet many of today's corporate needs.

In particular, the state has a lack of people with two-year associate technology degrees, panelists said.

Fred Lampropoulos, chairman, president and CEO of Merit Medical Systems Inc., said the state has "a lack of understanding" about a "middle group" of workers.

"For us the big gap is still in-between.. . .There's this end, where you have high dropout rates and high school kids and entry-level kind of stuff, and then you have the engineering side," he said at the Microsoft-sponsored summit. "But there's this group in the middle that seems to be ignored by government. Those are the skills — those are the machinists, those are the mold makers, those kinds of skills. . . . We can't find it anywhere, and it's really germane to our business."

Robert McDowell, vice president for information worker business value at Microsoft, said studies show that the percentage of U.S. college students studying science, math and computer science is shrinking, compared to the overall group of majors. But he said financial incentives could be offered for certain majors, or colleges could do a better job recruiting people with those interests.

Dave Baglee, co-executive officer of IM Flash Technologies LLC, said IM Flash is hoping to get about half of the people being hired at its Lehi plant with bachelor's or higher degrees and many of the remainder with associate degrees, "and they are very hard to find."

He noted that Utah has a relatively high graduation rate from high school. "So I think we're getting them out of the high schools, but are we channeling them into the right topics? Probably not," Baglee said.

He's also seen trouble as the company conducts job interviews. "And what's really staggering is that people who have some of these two-year degrees cannot do basic math. They rely on a calculator — garbage in, garbage out, and they don't realize it's wrong. And that's a big problem," he said.

He later added that a degree often is not as relevant as "hiring a problem-solver."

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff suggested that businesses have a bigger hand in deciding what is taught at charter schools, and McDowell said the generation raised on video games might learn and be motivated in a different way than its predecessors. Audience members suggested more business internships and apprenticeships and perhaps field trips to businesses as a way to spark young people's interest in science and technology.