Well, Dupont gives enormous grants to educate honor students in the field of Chemical Engineering. I had a couple buddies who actually got paid to attend the University of Delaware CE Honors program(one of the best if not the best in the nation for Chemical Engineering). As soon as school was over, Dupont scooped them up and put them to work. It was a great promoter of the discipline.
The thing to do would be to widen this approach for other areas of engineering. This will help keep the talent in the engineering field, I believe. It won't, however, solve the problem entirely.
I have another friend who just finished a PHD program at Virginia Tech in Aerospace engineering. He's got a job lined up with the Airforce, but is already talking about dropping it and heading off to work for a startup that some of his older classmates have going (they're developing a fiberoptic fly-by-wire system for military aircraft, dubbed Fly by Fiber). He says, understandably, that the real money is in the private sector, and not with the huge companies, but with the small ones. Starting your own company, once unthinkably risky in that field, is now becoming an only way out.
I think that despite all the out-sourcing, it's exactly this sort of risky behavior that will be our saving grace. The brains are out there, and as long as they keep getting those degrees, they will be looking for ways to maximize their ability to earn (yes, the bucks make the difference). Earning, these days, cannot be gauranteed for jobs that can be readily given away for 1/5 the price, so it has to be done with creativity and originality. Our biggest task is to narrow the gap between how many engineers we produce, and how many are turned out by china and india.
