In an eight-minute June 2 broadcast on CNBC-TV, Dean Shankar Sastry joined Stanford’s Jim Plummer to discuss the shortage of engineers that some say threatens U.S. technology leadership.

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Are U.S. engineers an endangered species?

Dean Shankar Sastry appeared on national television in June to address that question, one that has become a major concern in engineering and entrepreneurial circles. Sastry appeared with Stanford Engineering Dean James Plummer on CNBC’s Street Signs, a daily program that reports on the financial market, arguing that U.S.-educated engineers, while fewer in number, are better trained than those from India and China.

The segment opened with a clip of Xerox President Ursula Burns bemoaning the lack of home-grown engineering talent in U.S. industry. “I don’t have a bias about hiring Indian or Chinese experts in engineering,” Burns said. “But I would love to have the opportunity to hire more American women, more American minorities, more American skilled labor.”

Titled “America’s engineering crisis,” the segment cited statistics, reported in 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences, showing that China each year produces more than 600,000 engineers and India 350,000, compared with just 70,000 in the United States. (Although not mentioned in the broadcast, a Duke University study subsequently debunked those numbers, finding that they could not be verified and they included non-accredited training programs in engineering, computer science and information technology.)

The scarcity of engineers is real, Sastry said, with a projected shortage in California alone of 25,000 engineers to meet the needs of the state over the next seven years. But engineers trained in the United States, he added, are fundamentally different from those trained in China and India.

“The mood in the premier schools in this country is not to produce commoditized technology providers, but to educate leaders,” Sastry said. “What’s lost in the numbers . . . is that the kinds of graduates we are producing are really quite different. They are technology leaders who are able to withstand several changes of career in the face of moving technologies.”

In response to a question about whether there are enough qualified applicants coming from U.S. high schools, Sastry said that Berkeley Engineering actually experienced a 15 percent increase in qualified applicants last year. But Sastry and Plummer agreed that changes in K–12 education are needed to boost the number of young people, especially girls, taking math and science subjects.

Go to http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=758682516&play=1 for the CNBC video.