The country needs trained petroleum engineers.
And students are flooding into mining schools and tech programs around the country looking for a way to cash in on the nation’s energy boom.
The trouble is those high paying jobs are also luring would-be teachers and even current teachers away from academia and into the oil fields.
So that’s fewer and fewer professors facing ballooning class sizes.
Inside Energy’s Dan Boyce looks into how schools are trying to cope.
TOUR AMBI: “This is the slate cafe, it’s the primary dining area on campus…”
A campus tour around the Colorado School of Mines.
(AMBI Pop)
Prospective student Justin Sanford is listening casually to the tour guide, sporting his senior letterman’s jacket from Anna, Texas.
He’s considering the school’s Petroleum Engineering department next year.
BOYCE: “Why is that?”
SANFORD: “Money.”
Money.
SANFORD: “because I like money.”
The money, the job opportunities--that’s driving a lot of students like Sanford into petroleum.
I mean, a lot a lot.
(AMBI Door opening)
DENNINGER: “Class sizes have increased like crazy.”
Kate Denninger is a senior in the program.
DENNINGER: “yeah.”
(Ambi of Denninger fades under)
She’s talking to me in the stairwell of Marquez (Marcus) Hall, the school’s $27 million dollar new Petroleum engineering building.
Interim Department Head Erdal Ozkan says on the day they moved in...
OZKAN: “Which was about two years ago--this building was too small for us.”
The gleaming structure of steel and glass was designed for 300 students.
This fall, there are more than 900 students enrolled.
(AMBI-MCCLELLAND: “Everybody here, in just a few minutes, you’re going to get a letter of whether you’re A, B or C.)
The faculty, though, is the same size it was a decade ago,
(AMBI Students: “A, B, C” MCCLELLAND: “Very good.”)
Associate Professor Carrie McClelland is starting a new group assignment.
She’s moving table to table, checking in.
MCCLELLAND: “I’ll get to you in a minute, sir.”
This section of 45 students is actually a bit of a relief for her, in most of her classes she’s teaching 80 or 90.
MCCLELLAND: “It makes it difficult to make sure that they’re still getting a great education…”
This same pressure--it’s not only being felt at the Colorado School of Mines.
Enrollment at he biggest petroleum engineering school in the country, Texas Tech, has tripled from 400 to 1200 undergraduates in the last five years.
Programs all over are seeing this explosion of students and the corresponding strain on teachers.
ALVARADO: “It’s becoming--it’s becoming unmanageable in some sense.”
Vladimir Alvarado is a professor at the University of Wyoming.
His program has four times as many students as a half-decade ago.
They are requesting more faculty to handle the growth.
But the problem is finding qualified professors.
Can a public university compete with oil and gas salaries?
ALVARADO: “We cannot, we can’t, we simply cannot.”
At the Colorado School of Mines, a petroleum engineering professor makes a little more $100-thousand dollars a year on average.
They could make double if they went into industry.
(AMBI--classroom)
Schools are doing what they can to manage.
Creating more and more sections of the most popular classes to reduce class sizes.
Moving to more multiple choice tests to lower grading time.
The school of mines is having more undergraduates work as TAs, like Senior Kate Denninger.
She thinks that’s actually helping her education.
DENNINGER: “It’s great to be on the opposite side of things, trying to help these guys get through the same problems I did.”
Industry is stepping in, too, helping pay for new equipment and classrooms.
At the school of mines, oil company Schlumberger is even paying for one of its own employees to teach courses as an adjunct professor.
And interim department head Erdal Ozkan says a saving grace in the professor shortage has been foreigners.
More international academics are willing to accept lower pay for a chance to work in the U.S, and particularly, Ozkan says, for U.S. universities:
OZKAN: “We have the best universities, we still have the best research programs, we have the best connection with the industry.”
(AMBI)
Professor Carrie McClelland’s—she won’t be contributing to the teacher shortag either.
She actually took the opposite path, coming into the classroom from industry.
MCCLELLAND: “No, I’m here to stay.”
BOYCE: “Even if you’re only making half as much?”
MCCLELLAND: “Yeah, it’s not about the money for me.”
Even if that is what it’s about for a lot of her students.
For Inside Energy, I’m Dan Boyce.
ANCHOR TAG
Inside Energy is a public media collaboration focusing on America’s energy issues.
