U.S. Falling Behind China, India For New Engineering Graduates; Top students shy away from the hard sciences; tech firms fear impact.(A)

Byline: LAURA MANDARO

Gennie Chen is the kind of student that science educators crow about and tech firms cultivate. She's also the type they're afraid of losing.

The 21-year-old UC Berkeley senior studied advanced placement math from age 11. At public high school in Fullerton, Calif., she took honors physics and chemistry. When it came time to take the SAT college entrance exam, she scored a perfect 800 on the math portion. In her spare time, she learned Java programming.

But when she had to choose her college major, the Taiwan native ditched the sciences -- and her teenage dream of becoming a computer engineer.

Instead, she's completing a dual business and psychology degree. Post-graduation, she's accepted an offer from Goldman Sachs to work as an investment bank analyst.

Students like Chen have prompted an outpouring of worry from the country's biggest technology companies, science educators and engineering societies.

They say that without an adequate and growing supply of computer, math and engineering graduates, the U.S. will lose its current edge over emerging foreign tech centers as bases for creating new software, breaking ground on new tech innovations, and ultimately, producing more jobs.