Palmer Luckey has a blunt warning about the US-China tech race: America is losing the classroom. The Anduril founder argues that US universities have stopped teaching engineers how to build. That, he says, hands China a lead well beyond cheap labour. He made the comments in a conversation with the Hoover Institution, highlighted by Fortune.
“American companies have been hollowed out because our companies feed these colleges a whole bill of goods on what they should be teaching people,” Luckey said. “Basically, we’re not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore.”
‘Architecture astronauts’
His charge is that US schools now turn out designers, not makers. China holds many of the world’s best battery engineers, metallurgists and optical engineers, he said. America, by contrast, trains what he calls “architecture astronauts.”
“We’re teaching them how to be high-level design shops that put together design packages that get sent to the real engineers in China,” he said. He even took aim at Apple, which designs its products in California and leans on manufacturing partners in China. “Apple used to have to figure out how to actually make their stuff,” he said.
