Posts Tagged ‘Engineering Schools’

Employment practices among major corporations are changing dramatically; few future engineers will experience lifelong employment with a single corporation or organization. Many may perform professional work as consultants or serve as contract employees on specific projects. To adapt to this new work environment, engineering graduates must understand that career-long learning is their own responsibility and must acquire the skills for self-learning. Although many engineering colleges offer continuing education, such programs are often degree-oriented and constrained by the academic-year cycle.

To be relevant to new graduates, as well as to practicing engineers at every stage of their careers, engineering colleges must re-think and repackage continuing education programs. They should focus their offerings on providing students with new capabilities, as well as degrees. Courses should take various forms ,with some targeted to business and financial management ,and be adaptable to the time constraints of working engineers. In this regard, it will be crucial that continuing education programs take full advantage of the evolving National Information Infrastructure (NII).

Industry should require and pay for engineering employees to take courses to sustain their technological and managerial competence, just as it pays to maintain its other assets.

Federal agencies that fund education should help universities and their industrial partners identify creative approaches to lifelong learning by funding pilot projects and experiments.

Engineering colleges should create innovative advanced degree programs, including practice-oriented degrees. Such degree programs might include course material on engineering systems; finance and accounting; and technology policy, management and decision-making. Courses should feature team-based activities and case studies. In some instances, engineering schools will develop such degree programs in collaboration with business schools and industry.

Engineering colleges, in collaboration with industry, should develop innovative ways of providing continuing education to practicing engineers by instituting non-degree, career-enhancing programs. This will be facilitated by new communications technologies.

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.

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.