Good engineers are hard to find
People complaining about how hard it is to find good programmers to hire these days has appeared on my radar three times in the last week from very different sources. When I hear about it that much it tells me it's a real problem. Apparently CS enrollments (and presumably engineering enrollments in general) and graduations are way down in the US.
The cost of going to college has also gotten a lot worse, increasing much faster than inflation. So let's solve both problems!
To increase competitiveness the US should start giving scholarships to all engineering majors. We should pick up 50% of the tuition or something like that -- make it 100% for women. Throw in a GI bill for good measure (those troops are coming home soon, right?) and we'll have more engineers in a decade than we know what to do with. Then we can get back to complaining about ageism and how all of us with mortgages are getting laid off in favor of the cheap college grads.