UPS Weighs In

This is a partial transcript from "Your World with Neil Cavuto," February 18, 2005, that was edited for clarity.

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: Well, more books on the Internet generally means fewer books for UPS (search) to deliver, the company announcing it still has a lot of work to do on new technology to make its deliveries more efficient and to deal with issues like this.

My next guest says unless we educate younger generations about the importance of jobs in the tech industry, we are going to be falling further and further behind in saving the global economy.

With us to explain, Michael Eskew. He is the chairman and the CEO of UPS and joins us in Atlanta.

Sir, good to have you.

MICHAEL ESKEW, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, UPS (UPS): Neil, great to be with you again. I understand you're giving prizes today.

CAVUTO: I wish. Yes, we want to know just what they are, Michael. What is this all about?

ESKEW: Well, what I think about, Neil, I'm a Sputnik (search) engineer myself. I grew up in the '50s and '60s, and I just looked to the stars and realized that I need to be an engineer and think about the next generation. And there was a reason for us to study science and engineering.

Today these young students are facing globalization and global trade. And they're going to compete in a worldwide economy that we never thought about. And I don't know if they're incentive the way we were. And I think it's so important that we continue to create scientists and engineers for the future.

CAVUTO: Well, what can we do? What could we do?

ESKEW: When I think about engineers, Neil, I think about that 25 percent of our engineers today are over age 50. They're my generation. And they're going to be retiring in the next few years.

We rank 17th as a country in terms of proportion of our students that are studying as engineers. That's down from third just a couple of decades ago.

We need to find ways to encourage these young students to realize that they're going to compete all around the world. I grew up in the Midwest, and I thought about Indiana and Kentucky and Michigan and Illinois. They need to think about China and Singapore and Japan and Europe.

And that's what we need to do. We need to let them know that they're living in a different world.

CAVUTO: But for some of them, they also need some breaks and scholarships and that sort of thing, right?

ESKEW: They do. And I think we do need to find ways to encourage that infrastructure, to give them that motivation.

CAVUTO: Yes, but we have huge deficits, right?

ESKEW: Well, if you think about job growth for this next generation, technology job growth is five times the rate of non-technology gob growth. It's a different thing.

I don't do anything today that I learned in college. But I learned how to study, and I learned how to be able to think about scientific methods.

It's going to be a different world for these young people, and for them to understand that they're going to live in a global world is so important. And that's really what I want to talk about, and the world they're going to live in.

CAVUTO: All right. Very quickly in the limited time we have. Alan Greenspan says things are just fine with the economy. Do you agree?

ESKEW: Well, I think the economy is steady. I mean, it looks like inflation seems to be steady. And globalization is something that we've seen a lot. We're growing all over, all around the world. The U.S. seems to be pretty steady.

CAVUTO: OK. Michael Eskew, thank you. Good seeing you.

ESKEW: You too, Neil.

CAVUTO: The man who runs UPS, Michael Eskew in Atlanta.

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