The fact is that for American engineers the industry outlook does not bode particularly well. In her keynote address in January to the International Engineering Consortium (IEC), IEEE President and Purdue University Dean of Engineering Leah Jamieson outlined the numerous formidable challenges facing modern engineering education. In her speech, Jamieson sought to provide answers to a number of important questions, including:
- What will engineering careers look like in the future?
- How can educators balance risk with the desire to be innovative?
- What are university responsibilities in preparing students not only for graduation but for the 40 years after graduation?
In beginning to answer these questions, Jamieson noted that American educators have had to contend with widespread disinterest in engineering. Most students moving through the American education system are constantly confronted with the importance of science, mathematics, and literature, but few are ever instructed in the historical importance of engineering, which influences everything from automobile and home construction to food and toy manufacturing. Ignorance isn’t always bliss — in terms of engineering, it can be downright fatal.
Here’s a startling statistic to consider: a recent survey found that interest in engineering among American high school students has fallen 18% since 1991. Meanwhile, the number of engineers emerging from China, India, and Russia is exploding annually. The rates of baccalaureate engineering degrees awarded continue to increase for these nations, while the U.S. rates have remained stationary and have even decreased in certain disciplines.
Educators must also contend with the ever-changing nature of engineering. Jamieson, who has been in the industry for more than 30 years, noted, “Right now estimates put the half-life of engineering knowledge anywhere from two years to seven years, although most people will settle on five years. I will tell you that if it is less than five, and certainly if it is less than four, those of us at a university start to get scared.”
What does this mean? According to Jamieson, “this means that by the time students are finished, half of what we did for those first couple of years may or may not be relevant. This is a frightening thought.”
Engineers must also deal with that other industry attracting away so many of its students: technology. One industry projection states that 90% of everything an engineer is required to know is available through computers. The same projection asserts that 60% of future jobs will require education and training that currently only one-fifth of the American workforce possesses. With so much needed expertise not being developed, the American workforce can expect to lose its global dominance and settle instead for assimilating ever-larger numbers of outsourced and foreign-invited professionals.
Perhaps the best hope lies in active recruitment: engineering has failed to keep pace with an increasingly diverse global workforce and has seen the number of freshmen entering into engineering programs decrease since 1983. The demographic entering engineering programs in the largest numbers continues to be Asian males, who currently make up slightly less than 30% of total students. White females make up the smallest number of engineering majors at less than 3%, a figure that has actually declined since the early 1980s and which is a perennial source of anxiety for educators.
Jamieson, one of the rare female engineering success stories, noted, “Since the mid-1990s, we have made essentially no progress in the United States in the diversity of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering education or the engineering workforce.” An increasing number of industry experts have begun to voice opinions stating that the industry-wide failure to diversify portends unforeseen consequences which extend beyond engineering.
But how does one industry make itself more appealing to American students, who rarely give engineering a second (or even first) thought when selecting their majors? Jamieson believes that the industry must make dramatic strides in the public school system and stake its claim where it once was.
“The 20th century curricula had engineering science at the core. It added fundamentals and engineering science, and toward the end, it probably included a design course — probably the best place to learn all of these other attributes. A possibility for the 21st century is to put the engineering experience at the core and wrap the engineering science around that core in support of learning how to design, solve problems, and do more open-ended engineering, even as an undergraduate.”
This will no doubt be a controversial and difficult process, though it is a necessary one if the industry wishes to retain its competitive edge. According to the Princeton Review, engineering is nowhere on the radar of most college freshmen, who are enrolling in exceedingly larger numbers in majors other than engineering. The top 10 college majors were (in order): business administration and management, psychology, elementary education, biology, nursing, education, English, communications, computer science, and political science. Engineering is nowhere on the map, with many universities failing to maintain an engineering department. In fact, students interested in engineering usually have to relocate to find good programs since they are so few and far between.
Jamieson proposed some very radical changes, including setting a higher bar for accreditation in engineering wherein students would not receive their degrees until they completed their master’s-level engineering education. She also highlighted the importance of moving engineering out of its traditional context in order to make it more attractive to female students.
She observed, “In some of the very experiential programs, international experiences, and study abroad engineering programs, the participation of women is twice as high as the participation of men or higher. In some cases, the participation of women is three or four times the participation of men in fields where 10% of the students are women.”
Why is this influx of women engineers occurring in international programs? “International experiences are incredibly attractive to women. In service learning — projects that tie engineering to the community — two to three times as many women participate as compared to the base populations in their fields. So this notion of engineering in context — a very design-centered, experiential-centered curriculum — may give us different stories to tell elementary and high school students about what engineering and engineering curricula is like.”
No doubt the debate is just beginning. But the dialogue is necessary if engineering is to remain a viable industry on the American landscape. As Jamieson foretold in her speech, the real question is not so much about innovation and capability as it is about the willingness to change: “The last unanswered question is whether or not we have the courage to make such sweeping changes in education. It is a large system; we have talked about curriculum and thinking about it differently. Do we have the courage to change? Do you want us to change?”
