Fight, fight for old Manufacturing U.

When I read about The Brookings Institution’s proposal to develop 20 U.S. manufacturing universities, my first thought was “what will the mascots be for the football teams?” Purdue already has the time-honored “Boilermakers” moniker but what about the others? Would they be the Michigan Machinists, the Caltech CAD/CAMs, the Lehigh Lasers or, maybe, the Fightin’ Facemills?

All kidding aside, Brookings may be onto something. The decline of U.S. manufacturing is a big problem and big ideas are needed to solve it. In a nutshell, Brookings proposes that Congress designate 20 schools as “U.S. manufacturing universities.” In exchange for at least $25 million annually per institution from the National Science Foundation, the universities would revamp their engineering programs away from “ivory tower” research and toward applied manufacturing engineering. Robert Atkinson and Stephen Ezell wrote the proposal, which was released in mid-January.

While more federal spending in an era of gargantuan budget deficits may give some people heartburn, there is a precedent for this program. In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act, which established land-grant colleges to promote learning in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” These colleges developed the ideas and people that mechanized agriculture and grew the mighty U.S. industrial economy.

It’s clear that turning the U.S. into a services-dominated economy was a terrible idea. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we built an economy based on opening endless numbers of Cheesecake Factories and Best Buys, and on tapping into inflated home-equity values to buy boatloads of imported consumer goods. We all know how that turned out.

So, in the hangover from the Great Recession, it’s more apparent than ever that the U.S. must build regional economies based on manufacturing. “In contrast to the debt-driven, consumption-oriented economy of years past, this new economic growth model places great emphasis on innovation activity and advanced manufacturing capacity, which together improve the nation’s competitiveness in the global marketplace,” the report stated.

The hole we’re digging out of is huge. From 2000 to 2010, the U.S. lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing workforce, saw a net of 66,000 manufacturing establishments close and piled up a trade deficit in manufactured products of more than $4 trillion, according to the report.

It will take more than scientific research to solve this. “While America has thrived on science-based innovation and has a strong science culture, it needs to become much more of an engineering economy,” the report continued. “The notion that the U.S. can win through science alone is fallacious, because science is a public good that diffuses fairly rapidly around the world and, by itself, has no intrinsic economic value. By contrast, gains from engineering-based innovation are capturable and appropriable within nations and, more importantly, directly generate profits and high-paying jobs.”

Under the proposal, engineering schools would include more joint industry-university research and train students through manufacturing experience. Doctoral programs would not confer Ph.D.s unless candidates had worked in manufacturing. Likewise, criteria for faculty tenure would consider industry work as much as being published in scholarly journals.

Brookings has other creative ideas on spurring manufacturing, including a proposed “Race to the Shop” competition that would spend $150 million annually to reform and modernize federal investments in workforce education and skills training. The competition, like the existing “Race to the Top” in education, would challenge states and metropolitan areas to develop long-term plans, investments and administrative reforms to support advanced manufacturing. The five states and five metro areas with the best plans would get the money.

I like these ideas and hope they get backing from industry and government. The U.S. needs the better, higher paying jobs that manufacturing brings to our communities. Programs like those outlined in the Brookings’ proposals can help show the way. CTE