Riding High in Rochester

Wayne Martin, 23, a lanky college senior majoring in industrial engineering, has good reason to be cocky. Out of 20 job interviews this spring, he landed 17 offers. Feeling as finicky as a baseball free agent, he spurned IBM and General Electric in favor of a $26,000 post with Westinghouse.

A decade ago, such heated corporate competition for an engineering prospect was usually reserved for graduates of renowned schools like Caltech and M.I.T. No longer. Martin attends the Rochester Institute of Technology, a respectable but hardly prestigious college nestled in a wooded area south of New York's third largest city. R.I.T. is one of many once overlooked schools that are riding high on the wave of corporate demand for engineers. Enrollment in its engineering division has nearly doubled in the past ten years, to 1,633, and despite the recession, all but 20 of this year's 425 graduates already have job offers.

Throughout most of its 152-year history, R.I.T. has been a modest technical college known chiefly for its excellent school of photography, which has close ties to Eastman Kodak Co. in Rochester. Until a few years ago, students came primarily from New York and surrounding states. Now the explosion of job opportunities in technological fields has suddenly made R.I.T. an educational mecca. This year's enrollment includes students from 48 states and 45 foreign countries. Admissions officers, who once accepted nearly all comers with a C average in high school, boast that they turn down as many applicants as they take.

R.I.T. puts special emphasis on computer science. Last month it became the first school in the U.S. to offer a bachelor's degree in microelectronic engineering, which is the art of constructing complex computer circuitry on tiny silicon chips. All R.I.T. students are required to learn how to operate a computer, whether they are majoring in electrical engineering or hotel management. Says R.I.T. President M. Richard Rose: "We're moving into a different society. In the year 2000 the liberally educated person is going to have a strong technical background."

The R.I.T. students are a sober, goal-oriented group with little interest in poetry or campus politics. They spend countless hours in the school's 15 laboratories, which are humming from 8 in the morning to 10 at night. From the start, an R.I.T. education is geared toward the molding of marketable skills. In fact, students are periodically required to leave school for an academic quarter to fill temporary jobs at nearby companies, including Kodak and IBM. R.I.T.'s energetic placement office generates ten-year forecasts of the number of jobs that will open up in the different branches of engineering. Those studies show that R.I.T. graduates should continue to be in demand, even in a down economy.

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