John Yochelson’s work only matters if keeping America on top of the world’s economy matters. It only matters if the United States wants to maintain and further develop the world’s best jobs. It only matters if America wants to preserve and enhance its standard of living.

Largely unknown to the world until now, Yochelson’s work from the 22nd floor of Downtown San Diego’s Wells Fargo Plaza is to keep the plum technology jobs of the 21st century in the U.S. by creating more homegrown talent — not just any talent, but specifically the talent of more women and minorities.

At stake, he says, is America’s position as the world’s innovation leader. That spot at the top of the global value pyramid is the only way to support the high-wage jobs Americans expect.

His vehicle to save the U.S. economy — and propel the workforce beyond its historic preference for white men — is BEST, an acronym for Building Engineering and Science Talent, a nonprofit public-private partnership incorporated in September 2001 with a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a $1 million pledge from San Diego’s own Qualcomm.

BEST’s mission is to solve America’s shortage of high-tech workforce talent by attracting more women, minorities and the disabled — now the majority in the American workforce — into the sciences, engineering and technology. His allies are the heaviest of hitters with huge stakes in his success: Pfizer, Intel, Merck, Hewlett-Packard, among others, along with the U.S. Congress and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Although a national organization, BEST calls San Diego home and includes two prominent San Diegans on its board — Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs and Augustine Gallego, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District. Other local education and business stars also contribute time and talent, including Lionel “Skip” Meno, dean of the SDSU College of Education; Catherine Mackey, senior vice president of global research and development for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals; Larry Rosenstock, principal of San Diego’s High Tech High School; Mary Catherine Swanson, founder of the AVID educational program; and Dan Sullivan, senior vice president for human resources at Qualcomm.

They are zeroing in on what it will take for the U.S. to stay ahead in the global economic contest, to have, as Yochelson puts it, “the greatest capacity to create new, high value products and services.”

That capacity has been slowly ebbing away. Yochelson’s numbers, drawn from the U.S. Census and National Science Foundation, tell his stark story:

One quarter of the current science and engineering workforce — the people whose brains and ideas powered the 1990s economic boom — will retire by the end of this decade. Dwindling numbers of students in engineering and the physical sciences are in the pipeline to take their places. Late last year, Yochelson’s organization reported to Congress that there were more science and engineering undergraduates and grad students in the early 1990s than there are now. Yet the U.S. Department of Labor projects that by 2008, jobs for technical degree-holders will grow three times faster than jobs in general.

American employers look abroad for workers when there are too few Americans to fill the American jobs. Qualcomm became involved with BEST, reports Dan Sullivan, because his company sometimes feels this labor pinch acutely and must recruit on several fronts.

“Well in excess of half of our employees are engineers,” he says. “It is of the utmost importance that we continue to be able to acquire the specialized engineering skills our products depend on,” including radio frequency engineers with direct experience in designing circuitry based on Qualcomm’s CDMA wireless technology.

Qualcomm recruits from 30 to 40 leading American engineering universities, Sullivan says, “and locally, UCSD and San Diego State have been rich sources of talent for us.

“But as the company has grown,” he says, “it is not possible for local sources to meet our needs.”

Although Sullivan says Qualcomm’s American recruiting efforts “are working quite well for us,” he admits Qualcomm competes globally for engineering talent.

“We’ll recruit them wherever we can find them,” he says.

Going overseas for high-tech talent is risky business, reveals BEST’s 2002 report, “The Quiet Crisis.” The more Qualcomm and other high-tech employers must look abroad for qualified personnel, the report says, the greater the economic and national risk it presents to the U.S.

The first level of risk is that of the work visa. Most international technology workers enter the U.S. on work visas known as H1-B. Other visas, known as L-1, enable foreign companies to bring their tech workers to the U.S. and outsource them to American companies. Both kinds of visas become political footballs when headlines erupt about losses of American jobs overseas, which means the number of visas issued for foreign tech workers in any one year could drop or rise under political pressure.

“Reductions of as little as 5 (percent) to 10 percent in the H1-B visas could contribute to industrial vulnerability ... given the sensitivity of some of the positions and the expertise required,” says the BEST report.

The quantum improvements in science and engineering education overseas and growing international employment opportunities represent the second risk, the BEST report warns. “What if the best and brightest (foreign students) no longer come to the United States or return home in growing numbers?”

Last, caution since the September 11 attacks has made immigration a tougher challenge as security concerns multiply.

Aggravating this chronic shortage of homegrown high-tech labor, Yochelson says, are the lopsided demographics of the science and engineering workforce. While white males make up 40 percent of the total workforce, they hold almost two-thirds of the technical jobs. Women — almost half the total workforce — hold less than a quarter of the technical jobs.

When all people of color are added to the mix along with female workers, they make up 60 percent of the workforce, yet occupy just 42 percent of the jobs in the science and engineering workforce.

The vast potential talent in this “underrepresented majority” can solve the country’s technical labor shortage, Yochelson says, and the nation runs significant risks by not developing this homegrown talent.

High Tech High Principal Rosenstock calls college “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” for his students, and says that 100 percent of his 2003 multi-ethnic graduating class went on to two- or four-year institutions. But enticing minorities and women into technical education and then into the workforce is not easy, nor is it a new issue, according to Yochelson. Studies and personal anecdotes show they can face overwhelming problems from the earliest grades. Poor math teaching in disadvantaged schools, channeling into school programs where expectations are low, unfriendly university science and engineering departments, scarce mentoring in the workplace.

Catherine Mackey had to overcome some of these problems in her time at Pfizer. While she recalls no major gender discrimination in her own career as a molecular biologist, the issue she faces daily is “the cultural issue, the difference in social styles between males and females.”

The majority in any field tends to create the cultural environment, she says, and biotech is predominantly male.

“So if you are sitting in a room with 200 men and you are the only woman, you need to be able to flex. You can’t be thin-skinned, and you can’t worry about the situation too much. Keep your eye on the ball and focus on what matters.”

Mackey began with Pfizer in 1982 as a bench lab scientist. Today, she is a marquee name in San Diego’s bioscience community, lending her support to other women via organizations such as Athena, the UCSD-sponsored program for executive women in technology. Testimony to her star power: she recently headlined an Athena event, “An Evening with Kitty,” at La Jolla’s La Valencia Hotel.

A key high school mentor opened the career doors for “Augie” Gallego, chancellor of the San Diego Community College District. As a child in Arizona, he attended segregated schools until high school, but picked up strong basic math skills including algebra.

At his vocational high school, where he took occupational courses such as electricity, welding and auto shop, “I was being pushed by my football coach to also be taking the courses necessary for university study. But what turned the tide for me was my teacher in automotive mechanics class.

“He said, ‘You have a good way of reading material and putting it together into a working model. You should consider becoming a teacher.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but where and how?’”

Gallego went on to be a Tucson firefighter, studying at the University of Arizona on his days and nights off, before fulfilling his shop teacher’s prediction.

Individual success stories always can be found. But the fact is that minorities and women have been few enough in the high-tech sector that nonprofit groups, scholars and professional societies have been banging away on the problem for at least 30 years. They have largely defined the problem in terms of economic equality, not national security.

For example, the Society of Women Engineers partners with the Girl Scouts to open girls’ eyes to engineering activities and careers, and to connect tech-minded scouts with mentors. Likewise, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers — with local chapters at SDSU and UCSD — sponsors its Advancing Careers in Engineering program designed to reduce the Latino high school dropout rate, increase degree-earning among Latino science and engineering undergraduates, and promote advanced degrees among Latino graduate students.

“But these underrepresented groups are not natural allies,” Yochelson argues. “Each has its own targeted group it wants to help, and thus their efforts have been fragmented,” he says. Individually, they have not had the resources to make a significant dent in the high-tech workforce labor shortage.

In Yochelson’s previous job as the head of the Washington, D.C.,-based Council on Competitiveness, he concluded that the need for diversity in the technical workforce went far beyond questions of social equity; it became a matter of American economic and national security.

Further, he says, he realized that “unless the (corporate) establishment could be brought around, we won’t get much change.”

And so BEST was born with a specific mandate: Stop defining the problem everyone already knew existed — the shortage of high-tech talent — and get serious about correcting it. It didn’t take long to realize that the answer lay right in America’s own emerging workforce majority — women and minorities. The problem was how to attract them to technical education and technical jobs — and retain them.

That’s the problem BEST is tackling now, Yochelson says, by pinpointing the so-called “best practices” in K-12 education, higher ed and in actual workplaces. To do this, BEST hired the prestigious American Institutes for Research, and then mobilized its own blue ribbon panels to spread out around the country. Their mission: to agree on what makes an exemplary program, then find out what’s actually working to attract women and minorities to careers in science and engineering, and what keeps them there.

Among the best practices is San Diego’s own AVID program, founded by former Clairemont High English teacher Mary Catherine Swanson. Court-ordered busing in 1980 had transformed her school’s affluent, homogeneous student body into one where hundreds of disadvantaged students were not on the college-prep track. Her job, she decided, was to accelerate the underachievers by demanding more of them instead of less.

AVID — which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination — uses a daily elective class to teach academic survival skills such as time management and library research, and college-entry skills such as test-taking. College-age tutors visit AVID classes twice weekly, as do guest speakers and career and college explorers.

The goal is four-fold, according to AVID’s Web site. First is to help students tackle the most rigorous curriculum, typically college-prep. Second is to get students into the mainstream of school activities. The third goal is to increase their enrollment in four-year colleges and finally, to create educated and responsible citizens.

The kids AVID recruits are the ones it calls “the least served middle,” too smart for remedial help, but outside the profile for gifted classes. From its start with 30 children in 1980, AVID now reaches 70,000 middle- and high school students at 1,500 schools in 21 states and 15 countries.

Some 95 percent of AVID grads go on to college, its founders say, 77 percent to four-year schools and 17 percent to community colleges. This is three times the average in California, reports Create, a Bay Area educational think tank.

BEST’s Yochelson leads the AVID cheering section.

In addition to helping students, Yochelson thinks Swanson’s workshops and summer institutes for teachers go a long way toward keeping them fired up.

“Mary Catherine is one of the world’s great proselytizers, and if you were one of the 1,000 teachers in her seminar, you’d see why,” he says. “She presents a young man from a family of 13 in the Coachella Valley who’s on his way to the Naval Academy and, well, it’s heartwarming. It does a lot for teachers.”

Not all the students Swanson sends to college major in math or science, shows a forthcoming BEST study. But AVID prods them to take the required college prep courses in case they do.

BEST makes its final report on best practices in K-12, higher education and the workplace public this fall in a presentation to Congress and the National Science Foundation. After that may come the hardest part, marshaling the resources and will to spread those best practices around.

Yochelson and BEST will be banking on research done by Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter on economic clusters, geographic concentrations of connected or competing companies, specialized suppliers, service providers and associated institutions in a particular field. Clusters arise because they increase productivity and innovation. Schools and universities are obviously key elements, producing talent that goes on to the workplace.

San Diego’s three largest clusters and their 2001 employment, Porter’s research says, are business services, 59,584 people; education and knowledge creation, 42,826; and hospitality and tourism, 40,193. The next largest local clusters are distribution services, 28,001, and financial services, 24,561.

San Diego ranks first in the U.S. in sports, recreation and children’s goods, where 6,518 people are employed; 15th in communication equipment, employing 6,796; 16th in information technology, where 18,237 work; and 42nd in biopharmaceuticals, employing 1,557.

Yochelson hopes to recruit a “test bed” of six to eight cluster communities across the U.S. where there are large pools of the “underrepresented majority,” and where all the parties with a stake in American economic success — schools, businesses, government, institutions, nonprofits — can be enlisted to support the best practices BEST has found to work. The object will be to close the high-tech workforce gap with homegrown talent.

Examples of potential where the right chemistry of cluster resources and the underserved reside are Cleveland and St. Louis, for their concentrations of African-Americans, and Albuquerque, for its Native American population. He’s counting on national foundations, government agencies and local matching funds to underwrite the effort.

BEST’s long-term success rides on three factors. The first will be its ability to persuade the powers that be at every level of government, education and business that the lasting solution to the high-tech talent shortage will be American-born, not enlisted from overseas. The second is that the homegrown talent pool must and can be nurtured among women, minorities and the disabled.

These notions seem entirely reasonable and BEST’s strategy can show the way.

And BEST also must make the case that the problem must be solved urgently, as any matter of national security should be.

It only matters if America’s economic future does.