Posts Tagged ‘National’

Given the changing direction and magnitude of support for research sponsored by the federal government and industry, coupled with the increased competition from federal laboratories and international groups, engineering colleges must look for new opportunities to establish collaborative research alliances. Some alliances may be local or regional; others will be “virtual,” that is, national or international alliances established through the emerging global information superhighway.

Regional consortia of engineering colleges, for example, may share research facilities, teaching laboratories and faculty. Faculty tenure might even reside with a consortium and not with the individual institutions. Other types of consortia could combine the resources of universities and industry, universities and federal facilities – such as national laboratories – or a combination of all three. The aim is not to create new bureaucracies and expense, but to facilitate high-quality research and teaching that is both effective and efficient.

The National Science Foundation has taken the lead in funding experiments in research and education resource-sharing, and in creation of virtual research and education teams. Such experiments also should be encouraged through the Engineering Research Center (ERC) and Science and Technology Center (STC) programs. Lessons learned by the NSF Engineering Education Coalitions in creating “virtual” research and education teams should be applied to these experiments.

To ensure high-quality research and education, federal funding for science and technology must be distributed through open competition, based on peer review. To enhance technology transfer and industry-university research partnerships, universities, corporations and federal agencies should ensure they have flexible and negotiable policies governing intellectual property rights.

Federal agencies that fund research and education should explore ways of encouraging educational institutions, research organizations, federal laboratories, and industry to share resources. They should provide special consideration for funding projects that are developed by consortia of institutions.

Federal funding for science and technology should be allocated in open competition, based on peer review.

To enhance technology transfer and industry-university research partnerships, universities, industries, and federal agencies should develop flexible and negotiable policies governing intellectual property rights.

Engineering education today is adapting to the changing context of engineering practice, but more can be done to speed and improve the process. A crucial means of accomplishing needed change is through partnerships with industry, government, and the broader educational communities. The policy statements and action items developed in this project are intended to help ensure that engineering education will be RELEVANT, ATTRACTIVE and CONNECTED well into the next century. Get payday advance for make payment when you buy a book.

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.

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.

Math majors don’t always get much respect on college campuses, but fat post-grad wallets should be enough to give them a boost.

The top 15 highest-earning college degrees all have one thing in common — math skills. That’s according to a recent survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks college graduates’ job offers.

“Math is at the crux of who gets paid,” said Ed Koc, director of research at NACE. “If you have those skills, you are an extremely valuable asset. We don’t generate enough people like that in this country.”

This year Rochester Institute of Technology hosted recruiters from defense-industry firms like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, as well as other big companies like Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson.

“The tech fields are what’s driving salaries and offers, and the top students are faring quite well,” said Emanuel Contomanolis, who runs RIT’s career center.

Specifically, engineering diplomas account for 12 of the 15 the top-paying majors. NACE collects its data by surveying 200 college career centers.

Energy is the key. Petroleum engineering was by far highest-paying degree, with an average starting offer of $83,121, thanks to that resource’s growing scarcity. Graduates with these degrees generally find work locating oil and gas reservoirs, or in developing ways to bring those resources to the Earth’s surface.

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One of the first distinctions that must be made is between science and engineering. It is not a simple distinction because the two are so interdependent and intertwined, but whatever difference there is needs to be considered.

Science is the study of “natural” phenomena. It is the collection of theories, models, laws, and facts about the physical world and the methods used to create this collection. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc. try to understand, describe, and explain the physical world that would exist even if there were no humans. It is creative in building theories, models, and explanations, but not in creating the phenomena that it studies. Science has its own philosophy with an epistemology, esthetics, and logic. It has its own technology in order to carry out its investigations, build its tools, and pursue its goals. Science has its organizations, culture, and methods of inquiry. It has its “scientific method” which has served as a model (for better or for worse) in many other disciplines.

Science is old. It was part of the original makeup of a university or college in the form of natural philosophy. It came out of antiquity, developed in the middle ages, blossomed in the renaissance, was the tool of the enlightenment, and came into its present maturity in modernity. Indeed, the history of science is, in some ways, a history of intellectual development. This is certainly only true in conjunction with many other strains of philosophical, economical, theological, and technological development, but science is a central player in that story. Science is often paired with the arts (and Humanities and Social Sciences) in the “College of Arts and Science” of a traditional university.

Engineering is the creation, maintenance, and development of things that have not existed in the natural world and that satisfy some human desire or need. A television set does not grow on a tree. It is the creation of human ingenuity that first fulfilled a fantasy of a human need and then went on to change the very society that created it. I use the term “things” because one should include computer programs, organizational paradigms, and mathematical algorithms in addition to cars, radios, plastics, and bridges.

Science is the study of what is and engineering is the creation of can be. Only recently has engineering developed the set of characteristics that make it a legitimate academic discipline. Earlier, engineering often was viewed only as the application of natural science. Now, engineering has developed its own engineering science for the study of human made things to supplement natural science which was developed to study natural phenomena. Parts of computer science are wonderful examples of that. Engineering has its own philosophy and methodology and its own economics. It even has its own National Academy.

We differentiate science and engineering, not because their difference is great, but because, in many ways, it is small. Science could not progress without technology, and engineering certainly could not flourish without science and mathematics.

A more illuminating comparison might be between the humanities and engineering. One might find more similarity in style (not content) between English literature and engineering than between science and engineering. Both literature and engineering are the study of human created artifacts. Both teach creation in the form of creative writing and engineering design. Both teach analysis in the form of literary criticism and engineering analysis. Both are intimately connected with the needs and desires of individuals and society. A similar analogy could be made between art and engineering looking at studio art, art criticism, and art history.

Most scientists (but not all) feel there is some unique objective truth behind the physical phenomena they are studying. Their goal is to find it and describe and explain it, and this truth is unique although the approaches and approximations to it are certainly not. In literature and engineering, the designed entity is not unique to the situation, but it is a creation of the particular writer or designer and perhaps unique to the creator.

The distinctions of this section are not as clean or clear as have been presented here. The boundary between science and engineering can be and often is murky. Many items of study in science are influenced if not literally created by people. This is obviously true in biology and the life sciences but also true in physics where certain elements in the periodic table do not exist in nature. Perhaps, therefore, the areas of pure science are very limited. On the other hand, since people are members of our natural system, an argument can be made that their products are as natural as anything else and, therefore, the areas of pure scientific study are very broad. Clearly engineering is constrained in what it can create by the laws of science as everything is. Nevertheless, there is a difference in spirit in the two disciplines worth trying to delineate.