In 1939, he obtained his engineering doctorate with a thesis on surge voltages, and was appointed assistant professor at the university.

I spent a couple of years at MIT before I got my West Point ring, and took an engineering doctorate afterward.

The report predicted that the nation would suffer an annual shortage of 7,500 natural science and engineering doctorates just a few years into the next century.

Seventy percent of the people who received engineering doctorates in 1987 had commitments in nonacademic sectors, with 53 percent in industry and 17 percent in government and other sectors.

Today, 58 percent of those earning engineering doctorates in the United States are foreigners, twice the percentage of the mid-1970's.

Furthermore, 54% of engineering doctorates went to foreign students, who returned to their home country after graduation, which disheartens the executives of research and development in the developed countries.

But blacks went from 319 science and engineering doctorates in 1987 to 557 in 1995.

One of them was a 28-year-old design engineer named John Mulcahy, an ex-Boston College football star with an engineering doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His father, who died when the boy was only 2, had an engineering doctorate from Cornell University.

"They were tired of me complaining about inadequate investigations" of accidents, said Mr. Diehl, who holds an engineering doctorate in systems safety.