Bipartisan Coalition Bill Would Designate ‘Manufacturing Universities’

A bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators introduced legislation last month to help schools strengthen their engineering programs and meet the growing demands of 21st century manufacturing. The bill would designate 25 universities as ‘Manufacturing Universities’ and provide incentives to better align educational offerings with the needs of modern manufacturers. The incentives would be used to bolster universities’ efforts to focus on manufacturing engineering and curricula specifically related to targeted industries.

The senators—Chris Coons (D-DE), who leads the Manufacturing Jobs for America campaign, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)—have proposed The Manufacturing Universities Act of 2015, which would establish the program within the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Designated schools would receive $5 million per year for four years to meet specific goals, including focusing engineering programs on manufacturing, building new partnerships with manufacturing firms, growing training opportunities and fostering manufacturing entrepreneurship. The program would be run by the Director of the NIST, in coordination with the Secretaries of Defense and Energy, and the Director of the National Science Foundation, among others.

Announcing the legislation, Senator Coons said it was critical that U.S. schools and universities equip students for success in manufacturing. “Although our economy has created more than 800,000 manufacturing jobs over the last five years,” he said, “hundreds of thousands of jobs remain unfilled because we don’t have enough trained workers.”

This legislation has widespread academic endorsement, as well as manufacturing-community support from Dow, DuPont and Siemens.