INDIANAPOLIS — Countries such as China and South Korea are graduating engineers in record numbers, while America's contribution to the field is on the decline. To stay competitive in the field, experts are saying that the way America educates its engineering students, and who it educates, must change.
This was the message at the 35th Annual Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference held in Indianapolis in October, which brought together close to 700 of the brightest minds in engineering education in America and beyond.
"What is going on with globalization? What do we need to do? It's changing the way people work, career flows, [necessary] technical skills, everything," said William C. Oakes, Co-Director of the EPICS engineering education program at Purdue University, one of the three organizers of FIE.
Conference co-host, Purdue Engineering School professor Dr. Charles F. Yokomoto, worries about the drain of jobs from the US. "There are a loss of US jobs going overseas, first the manufacturing, then the design, and finally the research," he stressed. Not only does engineering need to change, but the breadth of its education for each student must increase, argued Yokomoto.
The rate of U.S. engineering graduates declined by 20 percent between 1985 and 2000, according to Dr. Frank Bullen, Dean of the University of Tasmania Department of Engineering.
One reason for the decline is that many high schools no longer see universities as being their main clients, said Bullen. Instead, schools are simply trying to educate children "to be part of society."
Math and physics education has suffered as a result of the trend in education, and numerous conference attendees noted a "dumbing-down" of many students coming out of high school, especially in the sciences. The end result is a smaller pool of potential engineering candidates.
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Skilled people not being drawn into or recruited for the discipline of engineering, such as in the case of women, has also become a major factor. Enrollment of women in U.S. engineering programs was only 20 percent of total enrollment in 2003.
"When it comes to engineering, girls are being asked to be only a part of a person, so they don't choose this career," said Dr. Alice M. Agogino, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley. Traditional post-secondary engineering education has focused almost exclusively on technical expertise. The forefront of the movement to change engineering education, at least looking at the FIE conference, appears to target this directly.
"Historically, we were choosing a narrow range of white males [to become engineers]. We no longer can find the students to fit the profession, so we have to change the profession to fit the students, while retaining the essence," said Dr. Norman L. Frontenberry, Director of the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE), part of the National Academy of Engineering. Frontenberry also believes that a much greater emphasis needs to be placed on developing engineering educational techniques.
At the vanguard of the movement to make this transformation is Dr. Carlotta A. Berry, a young robotics Professor at Tennessee State University. Berry presented an award-winning paper, "The Re-Design of an Introductory Circuits Course Based On Student Demographics," at the conference, showcasing her successful approach to student-centered learning. She hopes that she will inspire other engineering teachers.
Further, the US will need to adapt more to international needs. "Internationalization of engineering curricula appears to be low," said Dr. Bullen, suggesting that this is because the US has traditionally focused on its own markets. Indeed, in Europe simple devices such as heat exchangers have been standard issue for large buildings with central heating systems, while in the US less than 1% of such structures use such energy and cost-saving innovations.
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To be competitive internationally, environmental sustainability will soon need to be on the front end of any design program, argued Dr. Agogino, also co-author of the National Academy of Engineering's report titled, "The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century."
The report highlights coming engineering challenges, with environmental and energy-depletion-related problems topping the list. It does not see outsourcing of engineering jobs internationally as something that should be dreaded. "We need to welcome the competition and the inclusion that a world economy gives," said Agogino, adding that many large engineering companies intend to outsource 10-20% of their workforce in the next few years.
The engineering education mandate needs to go further, according to conference organizer Dr. David Voltmer, engineering professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. "Engineering is a public profession…Social responsibility, that's what should be [its] foundation," he said.
Voltmer wants to see new engineers doing entrepreneurial and ethics-related coursework. "If engineers don't provide guidance [to society] in the use of the technologies they develop, they [the technologies] will be abused," he said.
A pioneering example of the charge to educate more well-rounded engineers can be found at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, part of the Stanford University School of Engineering. The program, which serves about 1,500 students per year, is elective. However, there is fierce competition to get into some its special courses, said Dr. Tina Seelig, its Executive Director, who also delivered the keynote address at FIE.
The program's goal is not to supplant elements of the existing engineering curriculum, but rather to help engineers learn "to work productively on teams, negotiate, and stimulate creativity," emphasized Seelig. The students also learn the basics of marketing, strategy, and finance.
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