Posts Tagged ‘Engineering Education’

Through its accreditation process, the U.S. engineering education system has continually reexamined and re-energized the engineering curricula. Engineering fundamentals have been and will continue to be the core of the engineering curriculum. But because engineers now operate in a world where their accomplishments are often more limited by societal considerations than by technical capabilities, they are engaging in a wider range of activities throughout their professional lives. Thus, engineering education must take into account the social, economic, and political contexts of engineering practice; help students develop teamwork and communication skills; and motivate them to acquire new knowledge and capabilities on their own. Because many modern engineering projects require a combination of several disciplines, students also need exposure to the integrative field of systems engineering.

In essence, an engineering education today aims to prepare an engineer to be successful in the changing workplace. It aims to equip students with technical knowledge and capabilities, flexibility and an understanding of the societal context of engineering.

Engineering schools should not seek to develop these contextual and process skills through separate courses, but by incorporating them into existing curricula and through non-classroom activities. Coursework should feature multidisciplinary, collaborative, active learning; and take into account students’ varied learning styles.

One factor that will promote development of students’ “process” skills is widespread use of multimedia, worldwide information networks. Using this resource, students can access new information and coursework, as well as interact with other students, researchers, practicing engineers in industry and government, and experts from around the world. These changes in the teaching and learning environment will make engineering education more attractive to both students and faculty, if faculty are given the opportunity to stay up-to-date.

Finally, all engineering colleges must address the issue of ethics. While ethics is a complex and difficult topic, engineering administrators and faculty must help students understand that throughout their careers they will encounter ethical issues which they will need to recognize and deal with rationally. Whether engineers are conducting engineering research, managing a company, or building bridges and office buildings, their decisions affect the lives and property of the greater community. Students must understand the importance of upholding that public trust.

While recognizing and encouraging diverse institutional missions and changing industry needs, colleges of engineering must re-examine their curricula and programs to ensure they prepare their students for the broadened world of engineering work. This process has begun among most engineering colleges and must be accelerated with the aim to incorporate:

• team skills, including collaborative, active learning;
• communication skills;
• leadership;
• a systems perspective;
• an understanding and appreciation of the diversity of students, faculty, and staff;
• an appreciation of different cultures and business practices, and the understanding that the practice of engineering is now global;
• integration of knowledge throughout the curriculum;
• a multi-disciplinary perspective;
• a commitment to quality, timeliness and continuous improvement;
• undergraduate research and engineering work experience;
• understanding of the societal, economic and environmental impacts of engineering decisions;
• and ethics.

Following the expansion of government resources for university research after World War II, many universities and their engineering colleges aspired to the model of the “research-intensive” university. This model focused on developing research excellence in scientific and engineering fields, and on creating research-oriented doctoral degrees. While not all universities and engineering colleges adopted the research-intensive model, many have viewed it as a standard of excellence.

The world now demands new models. There is greater competition for federal research funding, with fewer current employment opportunities for new, research-oriented Ph.D.s. The nation is shifting the focus of engineering work and research from a heavy emphasis on national security needs and space exploration to a more applications-oriented focus on economic growth and environmental preservation. Moreover, burgeoning communications technologies are enabling engineering schools to expand their reach and accessibility, and to experiment with alternate modes of teaching and learning.

This shift creates new opportunities for redesigning curricula and programs, expanding relationships with industry and educating students who are both technically capable and broadly sophisticated.

These developments have also created a new opportunity for engineering colleges to redefine themselves and to even develop specific niches within the broader engineering education community. While retaining a unified core of knowledge, engineering colleges must become more “context-based,” that is, more relevant to the needs of their constituents.

To accomplish this redefinition, each engineering college, including the dean, faculty and administrators, in concert with the partners discussed previously, must identify the constituents it serves, assess the school’s activities, identify its comparative advantages, and develop an institution-specific vision. Then, from that vision, the engineering school must articulate its mission.

The need will continue for schools that educate engineers with sound fundamentals to practice the profession. But a variety of models in engineering education will result from the process of schools reexamining their individual missions. For example, some colleges may opt to combine elements of traditional technology-based engineering education with a strong emphasis on broader skills such as written and oral communication, management, economics and international relations. This type of program would aim to prepare individuals for technological decision-making and policy-setting as well as for non-engineering professions.

Other engineering colleges may choose to become more like “professional” schools, preparing students for professional engineering practice through the master’s level. Such programs would model themselves after schools of law and medicine, in which engineering practitioners from industry would work on-site, providing clinical training and assistance. Unlike the other models, however, that of the engineering professional school would continue to incorporate undergraduate as well as graduate education.

As some engineering schools are already doing, the practice-oriented master’s degree could be the result of a five- or six-year program that incorporated a four-year bachelor’s degree. This type of master’s program is particularly attractive to high-technology industries that want engineering graduates who understand basic management, manufacturing, large-scale systems engineering and leadership. An issue is whether industry will fund such programs in significant measure, as they now support master’s in business administration degrees for their engineers.

Still other engineering colleges may decide to focus on Ph.D.-related research and preparing graduates for research and teaching careers. This decision must be taken with the full understanding, however, that the nation’s support system for research is changing, and there will likely be fewer research positions a available through industry, the federal government and academe.

Engineering education needs these and other models, combinations of models, and more. No one model suits every engineer or every organization that engineers serve. This diversity in the engineering educational system encourages creativity and satisfies the varied interests and needs of employers and students in the United States and abroad.

Every engineering college should identify the constituencies it serves, establish a clear vision, define its mission through a conscious examination of the school’s current activities and comparative advantages, and then set future strategic directions.

Within the context of the overall institutional vision, every engineering educational program should be driven by a periodically reviewed planning process. This process should identify the program’s objectives and lead to a specific plan, with milestones, for accomplishing them. Internal and external reviews of each engineering education program, which should include industrial participation, should encourage progress toward meeting those stated objectives.

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.

And that future resides in the young men and women considering technical careers, their teachers and mentors, and the industry leaders who work with the academic community.

Electrical engineering can be a rewarding career. You learn how things work, you solve problems, and you use your knowledge to create products that enhance—and even save—lives. The field changes rapidly, providing new opportunities for engineers to grow professionally, be creative, and make a difference in the world. For these and other reasons, many engineers wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.

The engineering profession in the US, however, is at a crossroads. New technologies offer the promise of rewarding careers, and there are infinite products yet to invent. But despite these limitless opportunities, enrollment in engineering programs at American universities is flat at best.

The numbers speak for themselves. Figure 1 shows the number of US electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degrees earned from 1971 through 2003. From the late 1970s though the 1980s, ECE degrees rose steadily, and salaries went right along with them as employers snatched every ECE graduate in sight. By the 1990s, ECE degrees dropped steadily.

To find out why people choose—or do not choose—engineering as a career, what employers look for, and industry’s role in engineering education, we spoke with professors, students, and professionals.

From our interviews, we found numerous reasons why young people enter engineering, the most prominent being that they already know an engineer, usually a parent or relative. Knowing someone in the field gives young people the introduction they need to pursue engineering as a career. Furthermore, teachers and shop courses may pique someone’s interest in engineering. Conversely, many bright students never study engineering because they don’t know anything about what engineers do.

Figure 1. Electrical and computer engineering degrees rose in the 1980s and dropped through the 1990s, with master’s degrees becoming a larger portion of the total.