Posts Tagged ‘board’

Engineering colleges must be more effective and visible partners within the broader university community. This partnership should be enhanced for non-classroom activities as well as for formal research and education. Engineering colleges, their faculty and students have much to offer the broader campus community. For example, engineers can provide the real-world context to show non-engineering students the applications of the mathematical and scientific concepts they are learning. Engineering educators and their colleagues in science can also provide leadership in helping their campuses initiate computer networking and make effective use of the information super highway. Industry can help foster this cross-campus interaction by bringing multifaceted problems to the university that require the talents of several disciplines to solve. Industry representatives who sit on university advisory boards should also stress this approach in their recommendations to the institution.

Conversely, engineering education programs have much to gain from other disciplines. New insights can be provided, for example, by chemistry in developing environmentally friendly technologies, by political science in teaching the value of issues advocacy, by art in designing new consumer products, by business in aiding the understanding of international trade issues, and by law in treating intellectual property rights. Both engineering students and faculty would benefit from such interdisciplinary collaboration.

Engineers working with other colleagues across the university can also promote technological literacy for all students. Engineering colleges should accept responsibility for providing technical literacy programs to liberal arts students. Activities can include developing and teaching courses that provide laboratory or design experience for non-engineers, examine the history of science and technology, or discuss the interaction of technology and society.

At the same time, student participation in university-wide activities, such as student government, professional societies, athletics, and performing arts can help them develop the leadership and communications skills that are an important part of an engineering education.

Engineering deans should actively encourage their faculty members to participate in research, educational and leadership activities beyond the engineering college. Industrial advisory board members should stress cross-campus interaction in their recommendations to the college. Activities should include connections with such units as the schools of business, medicine, arts, sciences, and education.

Engineering deans and faculty should actively encourage students to participate in university-wide activities. These activities can include participation in student government, student professional societies, athletics, performing arts, debate, study abroad, and similar activities. The aim is to promote leadership and communications skills as well as a sense of the integration of engineering into the broader world.

Engineering deans should take responsibility for helping non-engineering majors on their campuses better understand the importance and relevance of technology in their lives, and seek to better equip those students to prosper in an increasingly technological world. Engineering schools may develop specific courses, seminars, guest lectureships, and cross-campus projects.

Given the national importance of engineering education and the major changes taking place in higher education and society, it is no surprise that in recent years engineering education has stimulated a variety of thoughtful reports. For example, in the late 1980s ASEE published the major study, “Quality of Engineering Education,” and the ASEE Engineering Deans Council produced specific reports on the supply of engineering faculty and students.

In 1991, the National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC) created a Board on Engineering Education, which has conducted a wide-ranging study of the future of engineering education. The Board’s work has included a series of hearings throughout the country and has had a valuable influence on this project.

Those studying engineering education have proposed many ways to make engineering programs more relevant and cost-effective for all students, as well as more attractive to historically underrepresented groups. Their recommendations have created an environment for change and experimentation.

The Action Plan

The aim of this project is to evaluate recommendations of previous studies, combine them with the recommendations of the workshop conducted as part of the present study, and then develop key action items based on a series of policy statements. Because certain key changes in engineering education will be most effective if implemented with the aid of all sectors of the community, this project focuses on action items that require partnerships. Some of the action items are short-term, others longer-term; none is necessarily easy to accomplish. Over the next few years, this project will further refine the action items, assess the accomplishments of engineering colleges toward those goals, and establish a series of milestones for measuring future progress within the engineering education community.

In today’s world and in the future, engineering education programs must not only teach the fundamentals of engineering theory, experimentation and practice, but be RELEVANT, ATTRACTIVE and CONNECTED:

RELEVANT to the lives and careers of students, preparing them for a broad range of careers, as well as for lifelong learning involving both formal programs and hands-on experience;

ATTRACTIVE so that the excitement and intellectual content of engineering will attract highly talented students with a wider variety of backgrounds and career interests, particularly women, underrepresented minorities and the disabled, and will empower them to succeed; and

CONNECTED to the needs and issues of the broader community through integrated activities with other parts of the educational system, industry and government.

Engineering colleges’ ability to make their programs both relevant and attractive will depend, to a large extent, on how well they connect their programs to all community sectors, that is, on how well they build partnerships.

Focusing On Partnerships

While engineering deans are principally responsible for leading engineering education, they work in partnership with their faculties, presidents, senior university administrators, and often, with industry representatives. Such partnerships must also extend to elementary and secondary schools, the broader university, the local community, government and other engineering colleges, and build even closer ties to industry. These sectors make up the broad constituency of engineering education. Collaboration with these groups ensures the vitality and relevance of engineering programs, and enables the sharing of resources in a fiscally-constrained era. Ultimately, engineering colleges ,like their successful counterparts in industry ,must be part of a seamless system that links all of their constituents in education, industry, and the broad public community.

We live in a time of revolutionary change. Not only is the world relying increasingly on technology for economic growth and job development, but the nation is making the difficult transition of refocusing a significant amount of its technology investment from national security to international economic competitiveness. At the same time, we view technology as important in helping solve many difficult societal problems, from creating environmentally-sustainable development and improving communications, to devising more effective and cost-efficient health care systems. Communications developments alone are leading to profound redefinitions of such concepts as “community,” “library,” “corporation,” and even “university.”

Within this technological context, engineers play an ever more significant role. They develop new manufacturing processes and products; create and manage energy, transportation and communications systems; prevent new and redress old environmental problems; create pioneering health care devices; and, in general, make technology work. Through these activities, engineers create a huge potential for the private sector to develop national wealth. As noted by Richard Morrow, past chairman of the National Academy of Engineering, “the nation with the best engineering talent is in possession of the core ingredient of comparative economic and industrial advantage.”

And just as important as their specific technical skills, engineers receive valuable preparation for a host of other careers in such areas as finance, medicine, law and management. These professions require analytical, integrative and problem-solving abilities, all of which are part of an engineering education. Thus, engineering is an ideal undergraduate education for living and working in the technologically-dependent society of the twenty-first century.

Responding to Changing Needs

One of the strengths of engineering education in the United States is the broad spectrum of engineering colleges whose development has been unconstrained by a single, centrally-prescribed mission. The more than 300 colleges of engineering range from highly research-intensive institutions to those that focus largely on undergraduate education, with many variations in between. Even with the considerable differences in missions, undergraduate engineering education programs maintain universal core curriculum content and minimum standards through the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), a national partnership between academics and practicing engineers. Additionally, most engineering schools have forged close relationships with industry and benefit from annual assessments of their programs by external advisory boards that have strong industry participation.

While U.S. engineering education has served the nation well, there is broad recognition that it must change to meet new challenges. This is fully in keeping with its history of changing to be consistent with national needs. Today, engineering colleges must not only provide their graduates with intellectual development and superb technical capabilities, but following industry’s lead, those colleges must educate their students to work as part of teams, communicate well, and understand the economic, social, environmental and international context of their professional activities. These changes are vital to the nation’s industrial strength and to the ability of engineers to serve as technology and policy decision makers.

Most important, engineering education programs must attract an ethnic and social diversity of students that better reflects the diversity of the U.S. and takes full advantage of the nation’s talents. Not only does the engineering profession require a spectrum of skills and backgrounds, but it should preserve its historical role as a profession of upward mobility.

In response to these needs, engineering colleges throughout the country are experimenting with new approaches to curricula, rethinking traditional teaching modes, and developing innovative ways to recruit and retain students from underrepresented groups. The largest and potentially most revolutionary effort is led by the consortia of colleges funded by the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Education Coalitions program. These national engineering college consortia each include a variety of schools ranging from predominantly undergraduate institutions to the most research intensive. The consortia are working to redesign curricula and improve teaching methodologies, each offering a different perspective and strategy.

While it is too early to gauge the success of the coalitions, they exemplify the engineering education community’s leadership and willingness to adjust to change. We applaud and encourage these efforts, but also stress the importance of including partnerships with industry and government in reformulating engineering education.

Many students consider engineering careers because they’re good at math and science and receive encouragement to enter the field from their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors. “I think that’s a reasonable thing to do,” said Professor Gary S. May, ECE department chair at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). “It doesn’t mean that it’s the only career that’s available to you, or you’d be a perfect engineer because of that. But I think it’s a reasonable thing to tell students that engineering is an option for you because you have this aptitude.”

An aptitude for math and science is certainly a requirement for an engineering career, but is it enough? Not according to Professor Richard Vaz of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Vaz, who is associate dean of the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division at WPI, said that the best engineers also have a passion for solving problems.

UCSB Professor Steve Long also cited “the willingness to do critical thinking” that makes good engineers. He argued that engineers are naturally curious and they want to know about something that’s not necessarily in a textbook.

Not everyone, though, has a clear reason for studying engineering. “When I ask students why they want to study engineering, very rarely can they articulate a reason,” said Vaz. “If they can, it usually doesn’t line up well with what engineers really do, which is solve problems and make the world a better place.” Some people, we learned, go into engineering because of the prospect of earning a decent living with just a bachelor’s degree. “That [belief] won’t get you very far,” added Long. He also cited “pushy parents” as another wrong reason that some young people study engineering.

While some people study engineering who might have been better at something else, many people who could make good engineers miss the opportunity because they don’t know what engineers do. “We don’t see enough of the brightest people coming into engineering because early in their educational paths, they get advice that essentially blocks their way,” said Moshe Kam, professor of ECE at Drexel University and VP of the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB). “There is a feeling that we won’t have enough people, we won’t have the right people, and because of that, we won’t have enough innovation,” he added.

Kam based his conclusions on meetings with representatives from 53 companies that hire electrical engineers. He also found that high school guidance counselors may unconsciously steer women with the ability and prerequisites for studying engineering into other fields because, “It’s not something that women do, and that’s a myth that we need to shatter.”

Georgia Tech’s May noted that some of the issues that divert women away from engineering also apply to minorities. “We have to show that engineers are normal people with normal lives with the same sorts of concerns as everyone,” he said. “This also affects our ability to recruit minority students. I say that from experience.”

 I was recently in the Student Union at Boston University chatting with a couple of students about their majors and the school.  Most BU students seem to be nice, but these two were a bit snobby.  Bad seeds, I guess.  During the conversation, they mentioned that they were majoring “Nutrition”.  I raised my eyebrow at the time, but didn’t think too much about it.

It wasn’t until later that I realized what had struck me: Boston University is one of the most expensive schools in the country.  If you factor in room and board, it rings to the tune of $42,000 per year (2005/2006), or $170,000 total!  Boston is also an expensive city to live in, and many students take out substantially more in loans just to cover normal, nonacademic expenses.  Therefore, we can assume the total bill for four years to be in excess of $200,000.  Even if one pays cash, keep in mind that the cash growth rate is similar to the loan money if placed in an appropriate security.  A person taking out a loan owes a similar amount of money to the cash growth that’s been lost over time.

Now college students tend to be optimistic, which is a good thing, but occassionally there needs to be a dose of reality (aka ‘life’).

REALITY: Nutrionists earn somewhere between $35 and $53K per year.  Superficially, a student might think, “well, it will only take me 4 years to pay back that $200K loan as a nutritionist/dietitian”.  Unfortunately, there’s a few things he or she might be forgetting: Number 1 is taxes , which will walk away with about 25% of our nutritionists’ salaries almost right off the top.  The other things generally unaccounted for are:

2.  Living Costs (Food, housing, insurance, automotive). 
3.  Interest on the loan, in addition to the loan itself. 
4.  Job market and availability of employment.

Let’s continue to use our Nutritionists by assuming that our two friends have no problem finding a job, and immediately land an average salary of $39,000.  Let’s also suppose that they suddenly learn how to be frugal and keep costs down.  In Boston, their favorite city, they choose modest housing and utility expenses, which account for $1000 per month, or $12,000 per year (Boston housing can range anywhere from $1000-$3000/mo).  After Federal taxes for their tax bracket, our two nutritionists are left with only about $20K per year of profit.  “Yay!” they exclaim to each other, “We can pay off our $200,000 student loans in only 10 years!” Then they go out for dinner and subtract an extra $3K from their salary for food and other expenses.  Suppose they devote all 17K each year to paying off the loan — with interest (about 6.8%) it will take almost *25 YEARS* to pay off the loan.  The amount that the two nutritionists owe grows every year that it is not paid off, so that in 25 years, they pay almost $200,000 EXTRA just in interest. 

Lets be practical.  Nobody devotes 100% of their income and lives like a pauper to pay off a loan unless they owe it to the mafia or a loan shark.  When in possession of an extra $20K, most people find ways to spend it on marriage, a house, or other luxuries.

If you plan to major in Nutrition or some other mostly low-salary field, it may be reasonable to attend a small college or state school with a total cost of $40,000 (or if you have substantial scholarships), but certainly not one that costs $200,000.  You do not want the growth on the interest to exceed your salary.

It cannot possibly be stressed enough how important it is to choose a major with an aggregate earning power higher than the cost of tuition.  If you pay more for school than you can possibly earn, you are wasting money on some “play time” and you are saddling yourself and your family with a debt that will last for the rest of your lives.