Fifty percent of all projected new Idaho jobs by 2032 will be related to engineering, construction, or computer science. That figure comes from the Idaho Department of Labor, and it deserves more attention than it typically gets in discussions about the state’s growth and workforce future. When you pair it with Micron’s anticipated need for 3,500 new engineering and science positions in the coming years, and the 1,800 Boise State College of Engineering graduates already working at Micron today, a picture emerges of a state on the cusp of something genuinely significant.

On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, host Tommy Ahlquist sat down with Dr. Amy Fleischer, the Dean of the College of Engineering at Boise State University, to explore what that picture actually looks like from the inside. Fleischer came to Boise a year and a half ago from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she had spent seven years as dean, and before that spent 18 years as a mechanical engineering faculty member and department chair at Villanova. Her credentials in engineering education are exceptional. More importantly, she arrived in Idaho at exactly the moment the state’s engineering ecosystem started to take off in a way that even optimistic observers hadn’t fully anticipated.

The Ecosystem Is Real and It’s Building

Fleischer’s central argument is that Idaho has moved from being a place where talent left to a place where talent is arriving and staying. The College of Engineering has grown enrollment 33% over the past five years, with Idaho students growing faster than out-of-state enrollment. The 1,800 Boise State engineering graduates working at Micron represent the largest university contribution to Micron’s workforce by a significant margin. And the demand is accelerating, not stabilizing.

Eight industry advisory boards across the college represent 111 companies, every one of them actively seeking graduates. Construction management enrollment has grown 30% in three years. This past year, 96 construction management students graduated and 118 companies competed to hire them. A new undergraduate degree program in AI science launched this year. A master’s degree in applied AI, designed for reskilling without requiring a prior technical background, launches this fall.

The pipeline from Idaho classrooms to Idaho jobs has never been stronger, and Fleischer is consciously building it in every direction simultaneously.

“I want people to stay here,” she said. “We’re the largest university by far providing Micron’s talent. They’re going to continue to need more. They want people who are from here, who want to work here in Idaho.”

The Eighth Grader Who Wrote Letters to NASA

One of the more memorable moments in the conversation is Fleischer’s origin story, which manages to be both genuinely inspiring and a perfect illustration of how engineering interest gets sparked in unexpected places.

She grew up across multiple small towns in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, first-generation in her family to pursue engineering, with no one in her immediate circle who had done anything like it. The catalyst was watching Sally Ride go up. She was in eighth grade, she liked to build things, and she thought, could I do that? Not become an astronaut exactly, but build the spacecraft?

Her mother didn’t know who built spaceships. So they went to the library, looked up the space shuttle contractors, and young Amy wrote letters to the HR departments of all of them asking what she should study. Three wrote back. All three said the same thing: mechanical engineering.

She became a mechanical engineer, spent years in industry doing plant startups, went back for her PhD, built a research career around thermal management of electronic systems, and eventually became one of the leading experts in data center cooling, which, as she noted with some amusement, turns out to be an extremely timely specialty.

“I never built spaceships in the end,” she said. “But I found my way.”

The Data Center Cooling Problem and Why It Matters

Fleischer’s research background in thermal management of electronic systems makes her unusually well-positioned to explain one of the most pressing technical challenges in the AI-driven economy: how to cool data centers without destroying water supplies.

The controversy around data centers is real. They consume enormous amounts of power, and the traditional cooling methods use significant quantities of water drawn from local aquifers and water systems, a genuine concern in water-stressed western states.

The technology Fleischer is most excited about is closed-loop water cooling, where the same water circulates continuously, heated at the chip and cooled before returning, without drawing from or discharging into the broader water system. The next step, which she was working on before becoming a dean, is boiling at the chip, where a fluid engineered to boil at exactly the chip’s operating temperature removes heat more efficiently than any other method.

“We heat it up, we cool it, we heat it up, we cool it,” she said. “We’re not drawing from the aquifer, we’re not drawing from the system.”

Her assessment is that this technology is close, not decades away. The labs have it. The question is deployment timeline. For a state that is watching data centers become an increasingly significant part of its economic landscape, that timeline matters.

AI as Tool, Not Replacement

Both Fleischer and Ahlquist spent time on the question that is genuinely keeping every educator and employer up at night: what does AI actually mean for the jobs that are coming?

Fleischer’s answer is grounded and consistent. She sees AI as a tool as transformational as the internet, one that will change the shape of jobs without eliminating the need for people in them. What it will eliminate is the portion of any job that can be automated. What it will amplify is the human capacity to evaluate outputs, catch errors, and direct the tool toward genuinely useful ends.

“The tool is sometimes right, sometimes wrong,” she said. “We have to create students who still have fundamental skills, can look at an output, and know whether that’s right or whether that’s wrong.”

The College of Engineering is integrating AI throughout the curriculum, not as a separate computer science topic but as a tool students in every discipline need to understand and use. Fleischer is working directly with industry partners to understand what AI skills specific employers actually need, then building that back into what gets taught.

For the working population that isn’t going back to school for a full degree, the new master’s program in applied AI is specifically designed as a reskilling pathway, no prior engineering or computer science degree required. For Idaho’s workforce trying to stay relevant as the economy shifts, that program could matter quite a bit.

The Research Making Idaho Better

One of the most compelling threads in the conversation is the breadth of research happening inside the College of Engineering that directly addresses Idaho-specific challenges.

A faculty member in civil engineering is working on wildfire ignition prediction, using data to identify highest-risk areas and enable rapid preemptive mobilization of resources before a fire starts. Boise State recently sent its first experiment to the International Space Station, with students attending the launch. The Semiconductor for All program has reached more than 22,000 K-12 students across Idaho, with undergraduate chip ambassadors going into local classrooms to show younger students what semiconductor careers actually look like.

Faculty who had never had machine shop training were offered a workshop last summer. Thirty signed up. Fleischer herself went through it. The philosophy is that engineers who can’t understand how something is actually built can’t design it well, and the hands-on orientation that connects engineering to the trades is something she’s actively deepening.

The New President and What It Means

The episode was recorded in the days following the announcement of Dr. David Hahn as Boise State’s incoming president, coming from the University of Arizona where he served as dean of engineering. Fleischer’s excitement was visible and specific: for the first time, the university president will be an engineer, sharing her vocabulary, her intuitions about research and industry alignment, and her conviction that the College of Engineering’s growth trajectory is one of the most important investments the institution can make.

Hahn had already been out meeting with Micron on the day of the recording. “He’s already connecting, he’s getting out there,” Fleischer said. “He asks questions and he’s willing to engage.”

For anyone watching Idaho’s higher education and economic development landscape, the convergence of Micron’s expansion, a nationally recognized engineering dean who chose Boise over San Luis Obispo, and a new university president who is himself an engineer is not a coincidence. It’s what a moment of genuine institutional momentum looks like.

Learn more about the Boise State College of Engineering at boisestate.edu/engineering.