Rockville, Md. — At a meeting at Montgomery College’s campus here today, higher-education leaders explored the role of community colleges in preparing scientists and engineers to improve American competitiveness.

The meeting drew representatives from academe, industry, and government. One host was Norman R. Augustine, a retired chairman of the Lockheed Martin Corporation who led the panel that produced the 2005 National Academy report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which addressed shortfalls in science preparation.

The session tackled several problems in how community colleges help train scientists, including gaps in transferring credits and a lack of financial aid for transfer students because that aid is usually used as a recruiting tool for freshmen. But much of the discussion focused on getting students involved in science early, starting as young as elementary-school age.

Students need more encouragement, some attendees said, rather than discouragement from guidance counselors and talk of hard, “weed out” classes.

“We haven’t broken the paradigm of passive lectures and recipe labs,” said Jack Lohmann, a vice provost and professor of industrial and systems engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He said learning in context with hands-on projects could be used by community colleges to get younger students motivated so they are not lost in the pipeline.

Panelists frequented cited research by the National Science Foundation, which found that 48 percent of people who received science and engineering bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2004 and 2005 had attended a community college.

But the discussion always seemed to come back to the need for more money. “In this stormy climate, nothing could be more shortsighted than shortchanging our community colleges,” said Brian K. Johnson, president of Montgomery College. —JJ Hermes