Progressive Engineer: Editorial - Educating Engineers

The following editorial reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of Progressive Engineer.

We Need New Ways to Educate Engineers

By Richard Weingardt

What has always struck me about my engineering education, beyond how narrowly focused it was, is how isolated we engineers seemed -- how what we do didn't seem to relate to the outside world. We were bright and part of an exclusive club: people who knew how to deal with facts and scientific principles. And boy, could we solve problems where such knowledge was necessary. But it was never ingrained in me until much later in my career what an important part of life and civilization engineers and their work are.

I don't remember a single professor (and I had several excellent ones) who stood before us and pontificated on what a grand and noble profession we were about to embark upon -- on the impact our work would have on society. Very few instilled in us how engineering meshed into the world around us or challenged us to go forth and become active participants in our communities.

Stuart Walesh, author of Engineering Your Future, states that "the root cause" of the "lack of leadership" problems we engineers face "is the way we educate engineers." He adds, "If the engineering profession doesn't create a new education paradigm, others will do it for us. The others will be attorneys, developers, financiers, businesspersons, and legislators. They will continue to expand their roles as deciders and directors in the infrastructure and environmental arena while we engineers will, by default, be relegated even more to the 'doer' function. Unless we change our engineering education paradigm, engineers will be even more 'on tap' and less 'on top.'"

Walter Moore, Jr., professor of the endowed Thomas Bullock Chair for Leadership and Innovation at Texas A&M, believes engineering education should be modified to be more in line with the schools of architecture, law, and medicine -- a four-year undergraduate degree (in anything) followed by a two- or three-year master's (or professional) degree in engineering. "It would certainly turn out engineers much more in tune to the world around them, an advantage young architects and lawyers have over engineers," he states.

It's interesting to note that in surveys of engineering graduates, recent grads wish they had taken more technical courses in college. After ten years of experience, they regret not getting more schooling in business and management. After 20 or more years, they're more likely to say they wish they had studied more literature, history, art, and philosophy.

It's time to seriously consider two types of engineering degree programs: one, a four-year, purely technical degree plan, for those who truly only want to be a technical engineer or technician in the future. And another that is more in line with (and equivalent to) a degree in law or medicine, for those who want to lead, who want to be professionals of equal standing with doctors and lawyers and architects. Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed-Martin, the aerospace giant, suggests that a five- to six-year course of study is needed for a degree in engineering, one that has these six basic elements: 1) An emphasis on the basics; 2) Development of team skills; 3) Exposure to the political process; 4) Development of communication skills; 5) Greater emphasis on "systems engineering;" 6) Instruction about the international world, because "the 'global village' has arrived."

In a similar vein, Athanasios Moulakis, author of Beyond Utility and who heads a special Humanities for Engineers Program at the University of Colorado, proposes that a four-year program could be effective if more thought went into the selection of non-technical courses. He reports: "Typically, a haphazard selection of social science and humanities courses produce meager educational results." On the other hand, he says, "An engineer who has enjoyed a broad exposure to liberal learning and who has had the opportunity to lay a solid foundation in the humanities will be 1) a fuller and richer human being; 2) a better citizen; 3) a more useful, effective, and successful person; and finally, perhaps surprisingly, a better engineer."

All these points have merit. However, the only answer I see is to have the two different degree plans I mentioned earlier: a four-year truly technical degree, void of any non-technical subjects (so students can get it four years instead of the usual four-and-a-half years), and a six- (or seven-) year combined bachelor's/master's (or professional) degree program similar to those for law, medicine, and architecture, so engineers can legitimately stake claim that theirs is a learned profession.

A structural engineer, Richard Weingardt heads Richard Weingardt Consultants, an engineering firm in Denver, Colorado.

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Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
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