Arizona Education Network

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Sky’s the Limit – Raytheon Missile Systems: Taylor Lawrence

Monday, 05 April 2010 22:30
www.biztucson.com

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Taylor W. Lawrence is president of the world’s largest missile maker and Tucson’s largest private employer, Raytheon Missile Systems.  Raytheon has 12,140 employees in Tucson and more than a thousand others working in California, New Mexico, Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky.

The question for Tucson and Arizona is “Does Raytheon grow here or somewhere else?”

Lawrence dismisses any notion that the missile factory will be moved.

“We’re solidly here in Tucson,” he said. “We may be forced to look at other areas to expand. That’s the real issue for Tucson.”

Education is the make or break for Raytheon’s future growth here. More than half of Raytheon’s employees are engineers, and the University of Arizona is the largest source of those engineers, supplying nearly 750 of them in the past 10 years, said Jeff Goldberg, dean of the UA College of Engineering. Meanwhile the Arizona Legislature keeps slashing university budgets.

“I’ve argued we need to make sure we as a state invest in and not continue to cut education,” Lawrence said. “We depend on the state to do its job.”

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The entire article can be found here.
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Related AEN Articles:
Presidents of DM-50, Ft. Huachuca-50 & Fighter County Partnership Pen Letter to Gov. Brewer about  Education Cuts

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Tags: az prop 100, job growth, jobs in Arizona, prop 100 az, Raytheon, Taylor Lawrence, tucson

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 8:37 PM and is filed under Education Funding and the Budget, News, What Stakeholders are Saying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.