Feedback: What did you think of this show?:
Guest: Dr. Neville Marzwell. Topics: STEM, Aerospace industry recruiting and expansion for the future. Dr. Neville Marzwell was our guest for this program to discuss the findings and conclusions of his visit to 20 of the greatest universities in this country on an aerospace industry fact finding and recruiting mission. In our first segment, Dr. Marzwell explained the recruiting mission and then started sharing some of his findings, analysis, and conclusions with us. What you will hear during this show will likely startle, shock, and possibly even anger you. Dr. Marzwell talked at length about student expectations and entitlements, salary demands, at times, even wedding ring and car demands by those students getting married. As you will hear, our guest went into the detail of student attitudes and expectations but also talked about what the professors do and don't do and why type of classroom experience produces better trained and equipped students. Listeners brought up several related issues such at GPAs in excess of 4.0, why only visit 20 Tier 1 schools and none of the second or third tier schools across the country. As you will hear, the industry focused on wanting the "best" so they limited their tour to the top aerospace schools. Toward the end of the first segment, Dr. Marzwell talked about the nationality mix of students and where they were from and attitude differences among the foreign students as compared the American students. As we started the second segment, we heard that in many ways, the American aerospace industry was in a panic over what has been happening in higher education. The industry is now very concerned about what the future will be and what their place in the future will be. You do not want to miss this discussion as it takes a look at what is happening here in the States and the global economy and as you will hear, the industry is asking the hard questions. Dr. Marzwell did a superb job of connecting the dots and demonstrating what uncertainty, risk and the lack of strategic policy planning does to business planning. both at the company level and the industry level. During this segment, we also talked about government programs to improve education and asked which if any of the programs were working. We also focused on possible solutions to the problems being discussed. Dr. Marzwell suggested we needed to first figure out where the country will be in ten years and what type of country. Will we even want an aerospace industry or will we be outsourcing it, even for the Dept. of Defense as we do now in every increasing quantities. He suggested that getting jobs back in America was an important solution step and he said many times that we had to bite the bullet to get the jobs back at any cost. We talked about the absence of national leadership and he said there were a few leaders but they were emerging from the business community. As we neared the end of the program, he talked about space solar power as being a near term positive and his new work on developing SSP for the future. As we closed the program, our guest again said jobs were the starting point for turning our educational and aerospace industry problems around. If you have comments or questions for Dr. Neville Marzwell, please send them to me at drspace@thespaceshow.com. I will forward them to Dr. Marzwell but be patient in waiting for and expecting a reply as he gets hundreds of emails.