State faulted on high-tech front

Washington is chronically shortchanging its university system, depriving tech companies of home-grown graduates and forcing them to import employees from other parts of the country, a top academic said yesterday.

Far from producing high-tech leaders for the future, the state's higher-education system is still too focused on producing factory workers for the dwindling manufacturing economy, said Edward Lazowska, the former head of the UW's computer-science department who now holds the Bill and Melinda Gates chair.

And while the University of Washington ranks among the top 10 schools nationally by some measures, its position is in peril, he said. A crisis on the scale of the Puget Sound's traffic tangle looms unless more funding is found and structural changes are made.

"Washington state is geared up to fight the last war," he said.

His blunt assessments, delivered at a breakfast meeting of business leaders yesterday, certainly provoked the audience.

"It was like drinking from a fire hose," said Jim Frank, a partner at Warren & Morris, an executive search firm in Bellevue.

Many of Lazowska's points weren't surprising — business leaders often claim that Washington is falling behind other states in its competitiveness. But Lazowska has turned up the pitch. He said he sees underfunding and misguided resources eroding the UW's high rankings.

UW, for example, is second in the nation in federal research and development money the faculty attracts. It ranks first in terms of product licenses under management.

But these standings have more to do with investment made in past decades. Higher-education institutions lose their edge slowly, he said, but also take time to turn around.

Today, state funding per student at UW is 25 percent below the average of peers looked at by the state Legislature. In the past 25 years, the amount has been cut nearly in half.

Chipping away at the funding has put the system in peril, just as decisions not to build roads and trains have led to gridlock.

"You can't run on fumes forever," he says.

Today's economy, meanwhile, demands a workforce that the state's higher-education system can't fully supply.

Washington ranks fifth in the nation for percentage of its workforce with a recent bachelor's degree in science or engineering. But Washington's public universities and colleges rank 48th out of 50 states in terms of the percentage of students of college age earning those degrees. When private universities are included, Washington's ranking climbs to 32nd.

By contrast, Washington ranks fourth in the nation in community-college participation. That training has served the natural-resource and manufacturing industries but is insufficient for the "innovation economy" of software, biotech, telecoms and technology services.

"We have an education system that's geared up to crank out people for the last economy," he says. Businesses here create tech jobs, "but they're not going to our kids."

Solutions are complex, of course. But one thing is clear: Because the state lacks money to make big decisions to support the UW, those who make the small decisions need to start start supporting it. "The little decisions have to go the other way," Lazowska said.

Alwyn Scott can be reached at 206-464-3329 or ascott@seattletimes.com.