December 13, 2007

Report Urges Sweeping Changes in Engineering Education

The pace of change in engineering education is “glacial” and must accelerate greatly for American engineers to compete economically and solve society’s pressing problems, writes James J. Duderstadt, a leading advocate of change, in a new report.

In particular, engineers should receive a liberal-arts education as undergraduates and then pursue graduate degrees as a standard route into the profession, says Mr. Duderstadt, a president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He released the report, “Engineering for a Changing World: A Roadmap to the Future of Engineering Practice, Research, and Education,” last week.

Mr. Duderstadt has helped draw attention to engineering education as a member of the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education and as the lead author of a 2005 National Research Council report on engineering research. In an interview, he described his own report as a synthesis of those and other studies of the topic. Some universities have taken steps toward some of his recommended goals, but he said he wanted to “add a shoulder to that and push.” —Jeffrey Brainard

Comments

1. This has to be one of the worst ideas ever.

   7 years for an engineering degree? Why bother? you could be a lawyer/doctor in the same amount of time and make double the salary. I’m going to spend 7 years and $100k+ to learn how to separate feces from drinking water? NO THANKS!!

   -disenfranchised EE

   — ilan sklar    Dec 13, 03:35 PM    #

2. Ironically, nowhere in the report is there mention of Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, founded on the premise that engineers should first be educated in the liberal arts tradition, and then learn the technical skills and approaches needed for professional work as engineers. Sylvanus Thayer, of course, had been the superintendent at West Point for 25 years, having turned the educational program around in the early part of the 19th century at that institution, from a “finishing” school to a rigorous technical curriculum. At Dartmouth, he found what he considered to be the right combination of liberal arts foundation (including science and math, but also arts and letters, history, etc.) and preparation for a profession. Dartmouth’s curriculum today requires all students to complete a bachelors of arts degree en route to completion of the ABET-accredited bachelor of engineering degree program. Students must complete full distributed requirements of any BA candidate at Dartmouth, including for example proficiency in a foreigh language, which most US-born engineers don’t have.

   — Engineering Educator    Dec 13, 03:39 PM    #

3. Dude you think the guys at Lucent really care if u speak german? It’s great that I nearly failed western lit, a course that’s never helped me, EVER!!! What does homer have to do with RF antenna patterns? you people in education are so far removed from the real world it’s really unbelievable. I mean it’s great to not have a real job, come in at 10, have your TA teach students, and run matlab sims all day, but that doesnt cut it where I work. Actually it does cut it where I work, but I wouldnt consider my job to be a real engineering institution either

   — ilan sklar    Dec 13, 03:45 PM    #

4. Hey I’m just curious, maybe you should have language majors learn calculus, single and multivariable, upto differential equations, cuz, y’know, they need to be well rounded.

   All I can say is that I’d never tell my kids to be in this major. It’s the most unlucrative, unfulfilling environment i’ve seen to date, and that includes working on venetian blinds in my fathers sweatshop of a factory.

   Save your money and go for a real profession because with continued ideas like the one presented by the guy at michigan will ultimately be the demise of what was once a respectable career.

   That said, after working with engineers, I think a better idea would be to have them all visit psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists, myself included, because I’ve never met a bigger bunch of agoraphobic, asperber-syndrome having, straight uncultured tools of human beings in one location.

   — ilan sklar    Dec 13, 03:50 PM    #

5. No way. I have tons of graduate work just to be a part of the engineering community, and took many non-engineering courses. Maybe for the first two years one could take a mix, but that’s how it is done already.

   — Jeff B    Dec 13, 03:54 PM    #

6. Many of us in non-engineering degrees have taken Calculus and Diffy Q. Don’t presume that we’re all math phobic.

   Having said that, I do think that we need more focused and shorter technical education in combination with the all-encompassing programs being discussed here.

   — PA    Dec 13, 04:07 PM    #

7. I have a lot of respect for Jim Duderstadt for looking into the future of engineering education. I take a strong issue with what is being proposed for engineering profession in the USA. If anything, I suggest we raise our standards in K-12 and educate our students in general education besides math and science. We can learn from British, German, and other models where 4 years of engineering education would be loaded with engineering coursework. Today, practically, 25-40% of undergraduate engineering education is loaded with liberal arts component. As a result, many undergraduate courses in the US are not covered. If we want US educated undergraduate engineering students to compete internatinally, then we need to load up the undergraduate engineering education with engineering/math/science classes. Having received my undergraduate engineering degree from abroad, I know how much we are not teaching our undergraduate engineering students in the US because of additional coursework requirement in liberal arts.

   — Engineering Faculty    Dec 13, 04:13 PM    #

8. It is very difficult to get a good job with an undergraduate liberal Arts degree. It is a problem in which many students do not discover until they graduate. I think this idea would actually hurt our students.

   — Business Professor    Dec 13, 04:34 PM    #

9. Just to be a devil’s advocate/stir a hornet’s nest/etc. But, why are engineering and accounting even options for a university degree… shouldn’t these be more technical/community college degrees? That way you can become an engineer or accountant in 2 years and not have to deal with all that icky literature or language stuff. (Ducks, cackles wildly, and runs madly for cover.)

   — wil    Dec 13, 04:54 PM    #

10. K-12 needs the revamping beginning with higher standards to become a teacher. We must start at the core of the problem not try to fix it in higher education.

    — LBP    Dec 13, 05:21 PM    #

11. I don’t agree with Dr. Duderstadt’s basic message. Yes we need well rounded, smart young people entering the profession, but to compete internationally, we need more technically competent individuals with an appropriate balance of theoretical and applied engineering education combine with humanities and social science courses that support the engineering profession. Those engineers who elect to go into management, and less technical endeavors, can fine-tune their education with the added general education and business education after they have become accomplished engineers.

    One problem with the nation’s engineering education system is that there are too many educators doing the teaching and not sufficient numbers of true professionals with real engineering experience. Are MD’s principally taught by non MD’s? Are Lawyers principally taught by non lawyers? Are accountants principally taught by non CPA’s? How many engineering educators are licensed professional engineers with engineering experience? Today, very few. Over the last three or four decades engineering education has become technically unbalanced and the faculty has been overwhelmed by the non practitioners. That is the biggest threat to our international competitiveness, not the lack of Hum/SS courses. The ABET Hum/SS requirement is sufficient if appropriately applied.

    — JRF    Dec 13, 05:30 PM    #

12. If you want students who can give you right answers today, then more/only technical course that train folks in the ways of current best practices is absolutely the best way to go. If you want answers to questions that have not yet been solved, perhaps not even asked, then the liberal arts experience is extraordinarily useful. as a way to prepare students for an unknown place.

    The divide between those who practice a technical skill or a craft and those who envision a field and a profession is growing wider. We have a problem brewing in that there is a need for “normal” engineers and scientists (TS Kuhn’s definition of normal) who master the status quo and are capable of maintaining and pushing incrementally forward the ideas, tools and techniques of the known world WHILE we also need the dreamers/visionaries/ mistake makers to fuel the next version of our world which is not yet, regrettably, perfect and is very much in need of our attention. Producing too few or too many of either sort is expensive and divisive; but allocating resources to produce what is actually needed is incredibly difficult on its face, and the difficulty is compounded by the tendency of those in charge to favor their own kind as they are dismissive of the others’ needs.

    A right answer will feed you and your family for quite some time; a great question will sustain you for a lifetime. The purpose of life is, if you have gotten to this point, is to do more than exist. If you don’t confuse training and education, both of which do very important things, the conversation can move forward. If you suppress the other point of view and deny it space to be, riots will be held in the engineering labs and lounges, just as they have in the other places where versions of this debate have taken place. And we will all be diminished.

    — painter who studied engineering    Dec 13, 05:41 PM    #

13. I agree that we need well-rounded citizens in order to govern, but this idea is a non-starter. This concept is the first step in making graduate degrees the minimum required for entry into the job market. Not gonna happen…neither the academy nor the public would accept it. The need for contemporary education can be addressed within an undergraduate curriculum. If more specialized skills are needed, that’s the job of ongoing continuing education and training.

    — Al    Dec 13, 05:52 PM    #

14. As William Cronon has said in his essay “Only Connect…: The Goals of a Liberal Education,” “More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways.”

    At Union College we believe that four years is enough time to provide an undergraduate engineering education which includes essential elements of a liberal education, and which prepares graduates to keep learning and to make connections. In fact we believe that engineering should be considered part of a liberal education.

    — DK, Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies    Dec 13, 09:02 PM    #

15. Regardless of your area of discipline, many of you technically savvy majors truly need the humanities, especially Engish. You murder the language!

    — English Faculty    Dec 14, 09:18 AM    #

16. Many of you linguistically talented majors truly need to learn more science. The drivel I hear spewed about global warming, stem cells and clinical research is painful. It is shameful how many college graduates lack even the most basic understanding of science and math.

    — Gir.    Dec 14, 09:30 AM    #

17. I was educated at MIT. It was too male, so I went to Wellesley for some years of poetry, philosophy, literature, psych, and sociology. It was too arrogant, so I worked outside the school creating a weekend Creativity Institute for kids in Weston with 142 kids per weekend who paid my tuition at MIT. It was too badly taught—so I learned programming not from courses but from Project MAC in Tech Square’s basement—miles of cables snaking who knows where so our main rule was never never unplug anything! We called ourselves “tools” meaning we were tools that Harvard guys controlled all our careers with their mastery of the contexts around our work. Later as an allumnus I kept having the same experience—old guys, now bitter, whining to me about how they were always “directed” by non-technical others, ruining their technical capabilities and goals all too often. How naive! MIT had succeeded in producing generations of naive people—who got a basic education about where power is and who wields it for what in this world, decades too late to empower their own lives! Pitiful! The excuse given, by MIT, was always that science was to engineering what economics was to business—an intellectual foundation we could be proud of, even if it left us illiterate verbally, socially, and culturally. All this never really mattered much financially till Japan came around the world in the 1980s and beat the hell out of MIT’s grads in industry after industry using verbal, social, and cultural skills forbidden in modern engineering education. Divine justice! Note—MIT to this very day still completely mis-teaches and mis-understands Genichi Taguchi’s design of experiments optimization process—due to faculty lacking verbal (Japanese), social (engineering subteams unable to compromise escalating technical conflicts delaying product design by weeks), and cultural (Americans assimilate Taguchi to “best technical” performance norms of their culture while Japanese assimilate it to “stop long product cycles by eliminating why subsystem teams escalate conflicts—using tuning factors not high single performance points as the goals of experimentation) LITERACIES. A man brilliant in his slice but dumb everywhere else in life is a danger to himself and all the rest of us—Vietnam woke up Lincoln Lab researchers as their wives asked them why they had to design weapons and how they could pretend that their work did not end up killing innocent Vietnamese civilians. I ate thanksgiving dinners with them as these wives tore into their husbands in this way—providing via divorce the educatedness lacking in the undergrad curricula of the men.

    — Richard Tabor Greene    Dec 14, 11:25 AM    #

18. to poster #15:

    I am an engineering major who apparently knows more about grammar, word usage and such than some humanities majors. I frequently find (and correct) mistakes in basic punctuation (people STILL don’t understand commas and apostrophes) and word usage in articles written by my peers in school publications like the newspaper and online “daily gazette,” which are probably written by English majors or something.

    Your comment was condescending and you are a fool.

    — engineer at a liberal arts school    Dec 15, 08:00 PM    #

19. Oh, what a great idea! In a few years we will have millions of pseudo-engineers, walking around selling products made in China, Japan, and Europe. The only problem with this idea is that we won’t have anybody teaching these young engineers how these products are supposed towork. But, wait a minute! That would not be a problem. All we have to do is to send them oversees to be trained in the use of products.

    BTW, would you please publish the resume of this genious engineering dean?

    — Engineering Professor Turning Salesman    Dec 17, 12:49 PM    #

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