With everyone from senior executives to line workers white-knuckling through a business downturn that's caused layoffs in the tens of thousands and losses in the billions, the comment seemed to come from left field. That it was uttered by the chief executive of Texas Instruments-a company that not long ago shed an ailing DRAM business valued at nearly $1 billion-made it seem all the more strange. But Engibous was right: Education is the cornerstone.

The restructuring economies in Asia and shifts in PC demand in the United States may indeed be causing a knock-on restructuring among the major conglomerates. Siemens, Hitachi, Toshiba, Motorola and others of their class may look dramatically different when the dust settles. But without a pipeline of talented and innovative technical people, the industry, and the information economy it drives, can't survive in any form.

Engibous noted that the number of U.S. engineering undergraduates fell 37 percent between 1985 and 1997. At the high-school level, the national dropout average exceeded 25 percent last year. And basic literacy levels and math and science skills among high-school grads remain dangerously low.

But Engibous strayed from the target when he praised the SIA for its efforts in raising the H1-B visa quotas and thereby increasing U.S. employers' access to foreign engineers and EE grads. The SIA may have trounced the IEEE in the lobbying war on this controversial issue, but it was a parochial battle.

The execs who were at that SIA dinner won a round in Washington this year, tearing down a fence that had separated those engineers they could and could not hire for their U.S. operations. But in the end they know the solution to the "awful crisis" Engibous described lies not in tinkering with immigration laws but in nurturing what has become a global engineering work force and plugging that work force into the global, wired workplace.

That's a grand challenge, and we await some SIA visionary's word on it next year.