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42 SMT Magazine • June 2016 education. It is their natural right! If you listen carefully you can almost hear the rumble below the ground at Monticello where Jefferson is bur- ied under the grave monument he designed. On this stone obelisk is inscribed the three achieve- ments for which Mr. Jefferson hoped to be re- membered: 1. Author of the Declaration of American Independence 2. Author of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom 3. Father of the University of Virginia The two paragraphs after the preamble in the Declaration make what the founders felt very clear: Governments are instituted to protect the natural rights of each individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Note: It's the pursuit of happiness, not the guarantee of happiness. And, ironically, this right of individual lib- erty (freedom) breeds inequality in individual results. So twisting Jefferson's intent to mean equality of results sets up a conflict with his true intent of ensuring individual freedom. The two cannot co-exist purely as one or the other. In the end it is left to the people to decide how much individual freedom they are willing to give up—the people get the government they deserve, as Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jeffer- son, and others have said in one form or anoth- er since the American experiment was begun. In a real sense then, the citizen is the custom- er of the government in the narrow sense that is defined in the U.S. Constitution. And, the citi- zens can fire and hire as they see appropriate. The student customer normally does not have the visibility to make a judgment on the value of their production engineering education. The real world companies a U.S. student ul- timately goes to work for however indicates the skills recent grads bring to the workplace are not the ones that are needed to give high labor rate regions of our industry an edge in competing in the global product production marketplace. There are three issues: 1. In high tech electronics design and man- ufacturing, as students move up through the e ducational pipeline the subject matter that is taught to them by academia progressively de- parts from the real world skills they need to be most effective. This would be okay if the ab- stract material (learning for learning's sake) was supplemented by practical applications that were based on the abstract material (learning for earning). This would close the gap (Figure 1). 2. The people teaching usually have little real world experience in high tech electronics design and manufacturing. 3. Other competing factors that the edu- cational community is confronted with are in conflict with treating the student as the cus- tomer (see below). One thing that seems intuitive is that the ability for academia to create a correspondence between what they are attempting to teach and THE PRODUCTION ENGINEERING STUDENT AS CUSTOMER Figure 1: Gap between a subject's complexity or abstractness, and the ability to create a correspondence with real-world problems— as a function of education level.