farewell to engineering education
farewell to engineering education
(OP)
just heard a program on NPR , involving an interview with some MIT professors and other education "experts"- the current fear that too many eng school freshman are leaving the engineering curriculum due to difficulties adjusting to the discipline required led to their recommendation that:
-to retain more freshman, the curriculum should be modified to make it easier, to allow the student's "inherent creativity" to be expressed from the first day of the first class , and to postpone or cancel the teaching of fundamental physical principles .
- we saw this movie before- the exact same philosophy was applied to elementary and high school curriculum in the late 1960's in the US, and we now have a nation of drooling Ipod ticklers.
Well, have to get back to watching " dancing with the stars".
-to retain more freshman, the curriculum should be modified to make it easier, to allow the student's "inherent creativity" to be expressed from the first day of the first class , and to postpone or cancel the teaching of fundamental physical principles .
- we saw this movie before- the exact same philosophy was applied to elementary and high school curriculum in the late 1960's in the US, and we now have a nation of drooling Ipod ticklers.
Well, have to get back to watching " dancing with the stars".





RE: farewell to engineering education
(Politically/economically unfeasible musing ahead)
A dramatic shift would be what if institutions received a percent of graduates earnings in lieu of tuition?
Say 3% a year over your working life? The incentive for universities to produce superior graduates is increased. Students no longer hold equal value to the university monetarily speaking. Retaining the 3 or 4 failing engineering students that may work as a CAD jockeys for 30 years at 40k-60k a year is no longer as important as pushing the top of the class on to make into the six figures.
Obviously academic achievement in practice has a smaller correlation to monetary success than may be necessary for any system like this to work. Yet there is something appealing about universities earnings being tied to success of their graduates not the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Comprehension is not understanding. Understanding is not wisdom. And it is wisdom that gives us the ability to apply what we know, to our real world situations
RE: farewell to engineering education
I think that the education "experts" in the above discussion consider "success" as the number of bodies that pay for 4 years of education and get a diploma. No consideration of whether the graduates have enough knowledge to be able to qualify to contribute in a demanding field.
David
RE: farewell to engineering education
Or so I've been told.
RE: farewell to engineering education
RE: farewell to engineering education
I see the day coming when there's a five year program for people who actually want to work as engineers, and 4 yr program for everybody who merely wanted something that sounds like it was harder to do than a Bachelors degree in physics or chemistry.
RE: farewell to engineering education
Unfortunately, accreditation by ABET or similar only says that a minimum standard is met and doesn't help differentiate good programs from OK programs. Even just within the US, there are so many accredited programs operating across such a broad spectrum of competencies that this task will be challenging for employers.
Also -
farewell to emgineering education
Tell me that title was intentional...
RE: farewell to engineering education
RE: farewell to engineering education
Fe
RE: farewell to engineering education
And with on-line schools, there maybe even price compettion.
Wow is this how the Roman empire ended?
RE: farewell to engineering education
You would think that it would go the other way. That is, as we evolve our society the quality of things like education would increase not decrease.
It is interesting how human nature is often misinterpreted and/or malformed by humans themselves.
About uni. engineering education in particular. I think things like quality/structure are too often decided by those misinformed or driven by factors other than quality (unfortunately). These individuals are also likely to not have an engineering degree and/or know nothing of what engineers do, so they care not. A factor not included is the individual. ie. one particular student may get much more out of an education then another who scrapes by. So even if they degrade the education system in the US in the future, there is likely still to be good engineers. There will just be more bad ones.
At least we know things can always change. Like a friend of mine always says with much vulgar. "Piss on them" LOL.
Fe
RE: farewell to engineering education
I think you've hit on the essence of the future--there will still be good engineers, but the number of bad ones is sure to increase.
My problem with that is that far too many of the bad ones will find themselves in positions of real power as "government engineers". I've seen a real increase in the number of government positions for engineers over the last couple of decades. Typically the jobs are "oversight" or "inspector" jobs, but WAY too many of them have the power to kill good projects using the pocket veto. If you don't suck up to these worthless slugs then your paperwork will tend to find the bottom of in boxes, get routed to the wrong desk, and be rejected because the margins are too narrow (or too wide). Complain to their boss (or your congressman) and your projects will slow down even more.
I've seen a few quality engineers in these roles, but they don't tend to stay around very long. The skills that make someone a competent engineer are very different from the skills that make someone a competent bureaucrat.
David
RE: farewell to engineering education
-Dave
RE: farewell to engineering education
One thing that is nice about being an engineer is that gray hair still counts. Watering down engineering education, will only make it count more.
RE: farewell to engineering education
I have lived this in more than one job. It is deeply disturbing to watch these people repeatedly make decisions that fly in the face of sound engineering judgement, even after they are presented with the facts that would dictate that their decision is severely flawed.
And I don't see this scenario improving with the news that davefitz shared. Farewell to engineering indeed.
Maui
www.EngineeringMetallurgy.com
RE: farewell to engineering education
If true there's no hope.
Regards,
Mike
RE: farewell to engineering education
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: farewell to engineering education
RE: farewell to engineering education
If you want to see engineers with no idea what they are doing, just look for an MBA on top of the engineering degree.
There are more engineering positions in goverment regulations, just look at NERC, and FERC. Who are trying to make all power system decisions as easy as following a set of guidelines.
RE: farewell to engineering education
Perfectly said.
Fe
RE: farewell to engineering education
The disappointment is when you spend a lot of money, time, stress, and hard work to graduate as an engineer, and you spend 10 to 15 years gaining experience to find out that the pay is not rewarding!! it is equivalent to any other average career. We as professional engineers should work hard on developing and fortifying this career and encourage juniors instead of taking advantage of them. After being a powerful career, rewarding, and prestigeous, we have worked hard to push away student, take advantage of juniors, making other engineers look bad. JUST WATCH AND LEARN FROM MEDICAL DOCTORS.
RE: farewell to engineering education
If the market rewarded engineering excellence with pay then engineering excellence we would have.
Remember there are two sides to the demand issue. One side thinks long term and wrings its hands over the loss of talent with a worried eye toward yet unforeseen problems we may face.
Nobody listens to these people, never have never will..
The other side optimizes the needed resources on a short term basis through market demand and the price / salary method that is so very effective in utilizing resources most effectively in the short term.
The market wants more,cheaper,faster people cause large scale problems are "somebody eases" problems.
RE: farewell to engineering education
The part about making it fun is great. The bit about ignoring the physics and math means it is no longer engineering.
RE: farewell to engineering education
You have it correct. Ignoring all the hard parts of engineering means it's not engineering anymore.
My question to these persons proposing this. What will we do in 20 years when we have more engineers, but 99% of them can't solve a DE or know what MP pseudo inverse in linear algebra is? ect. (insert anything else useful in mathematics or physics). This will certainly slow down R&D to a halt.
Fe
RE: farewell to engineering education
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: farewell to engineering education
Fe
RE: farewell to engineering education
Since I graduated the number of graduates has risen to 700+. The number of engineers graduating has dropped to 21. I understand from my business partner that the same thing has happened at his university (Georgia Tech.) The US is graduating a lot of liberal arts majors!
Our company has difficulty recruting engineers in the 35-50 age group. We are told by the recruiting companies there are very few graduates in this age group.
RE: farewell to engineering education
I don't know what the situation is in the 'States, but here in Canada we already have 2/3s of eng grads working outside the engineering profession. The kids that are choosing something else for their university education are simply responding to what the market has been telling them for a long time now.
Here in Canada, engineering enrollments on a national basis are growing at least at the rate of population growth. It may be that graduation rates for all programs are growing even faster than that, as more and more kids (correctly) conclude that you need at least a university degree of some sort to have a hope of getting a job in the present economy.
RE: farewell to engineering education
RE: farewell to engineering education
I have to ask why you are targeting a certain age group for hiring.
(35-50)???
RE: farewell to engineering education
I hired about a dozen recent grads over the years; their ultimate success had little to do with which school they went to, and everything to do with personal motivation. But none of them could be expected to produce much for at least 6 months.
RE: farewell to engineering education
"mid level engineers are who you target when you want someone who can hit the ground running, for an immediate need..."
What you mean is that mid-level engineers are what EVERY business wants. Mid level people are the sweet spot of cost versus productivity. You don't want fresh grads because they take time before they produce, and you don't want people too near the end of their career because they cost too much and might not stick around long enough before they retire.
Businesses tend to react better than they plan, and hence they very frequently find themselves with "immediate needs". Yeah, yeah, I know- the current business environment is so fast-paced, investors have a short attention span, projects come and go so quickly that there's no way you can plan your way around these sorts of needs etc. etc. Remind me again: how is your firm any different than any other firm in terms of what its preferences are?
"None of them (recent grads) could be expected to produce much for at least 6 months..."
What you mean again is that you want someone else to train the fresh grads so that your firm can reap the benefit- but since they all want exactly the same thing that your firm wants, nobody is obliging! Six months of poor productivity? Wow, that's rough- even assuming they do NOTHING for the first 6 months, that's a whopping $25-$30,000 investment into an employee- that'll take FOREVER to pay back! Out of curiosity, what do you pay a decent headhunter for a mid-level candidate?!
So: these mid-level engineers that you so desperately want- the ones who someone else hired when they were fresh grads: how much of a premium over a median engineering salary are you offering for their ability to "hit the ground running"? 25%? 50%? Oh... actually 0%? The sexiness of your business alone should be sufficient to attract them? And you say there's a shortage of them willing to jump ship from the people who hired them in the first place? Wow, what a surprise?!
You seem to want what everyone in business wants: a "flexible" labour force. Read this to mean a profession running with a significant level of steady state unemployment, whose workforce is cowed and willing to wait in line to take anything offered. Unfortunately, engineers are actually relatively smart people, with at least a little intellectual flexibility and some skills that are transferrable to other endeavours. When the labour market indicates that they are not needed as engineers, especially right after they graduate, they leave the profession and find something else to do. You can't store them against some future need like water behind a dam.
So: here we find ourselves, with 2/3s of Canadian engineering graduates working outside engineering or engineering management, a Canadian labour market study which has as one of its primary conclusions that we have a "critical shortage of entry-level engineering jobs", and employers still screaming "shortage!"- and using the temporary foreign workers program to satisfy their "need" for mid-level engineers. And of course- the solution is to encourage even MORE young people to pursue engineering as a career option!
RE: farewell to engineering education
The reality is not many firms operate with a horizon 20 years down the road; few boards of directors see beyond the next quarter or annual report. Few clients are interested in establishing a working relationship that will last beyond the immediate project, if they have to pay even 2% more.
If you see a solution, I'd like to hear it.
RE: farewell to engineering education
This results in a shortage of engineers who know how hammer out details and can train a junior engineers to do so. It also results in junior engineers who only want to learn CPM schedules and the like.
RE: farewell to engineering education
Better get used to doing it now, as when the baby boomers retire you'll have little choice in the matter, and nobody will be left to train the kids.
As to the demand for entry-level salaries that are not justified in terms of performance: I don't know what your own local situation is, but I know the following in relation to my own province in Canada:
1) Entry level salaries for engineers, on average, have not grown as fast as the economy or as the CPI, and
2) Just like 20 years ago, an entry level engineer still makes in real dollars (taking into account the time value of money) about 1/2 what an engineer does after 10 years of experience, at which point their salary grows more or less only at the rate of inflation unless they escape to the rarefied air of the "business world".
3) I don't think that the real productivity of engineers has decreased over the past 20 years, except perhaps as a result of nostalgic thinking that everyone is prone to.
In reality, much of the routine work a senior engineer does can be delegated to a number of juniors. Voila- drudgery shared becomes a learning experience! This is not scaleable ad infinitum, of course- there's a span of control that works, and a span beyond which it collapses into a horrible, costly mess. That span varies with the nature of the work etc.
One thing is sure: the ratio of young to old in the engineering workforce is going to have to increase, big time, due to demographic pressures alone. Not everyone is going to want to delay retirement, and those who do are not often going to be your most desirable and productive workers.
The firms that realize and adapt to this rather predictable fact of life have a hope of survival going forward. The rest...the light they see at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlamp of an oncoming train.
One thing is sure: recruiting more young-uns into the profession without first addressing the factors which drive employers to NOT hire them is utter folly. It's not in the interest of the profession or of the public purse which usually subsidizes this education to some degree.
RE: farewell to engineering education
Straight out of school, a Mech or Chem engineer in a historically lower-wage area can expect to get offers in the $55 - $60k range. A senior engineer (registered PE, 20+ yrs) makes as low as $90k to as high as $130k (I'm including gov't engineers but excluding Principals in a firm). So RCG's are getting darn near half what the top of the range is, straight out of school. There are two local gov't offices that go out of their way to hire the valedictorian in Chemical Engineering, and have paid as much as $80k plus a $10 - $20k signing bonus. No profit-making company could match that, I'm certain, not in this market.
Even at (say) $55k, how many of them can a dept. with 1 senior engineer, 3 mid-level engineers, some Designers and Drafters, afford to keep on board? Just one would represent a 5 - 10% dilution of productivity (initially at least). For the last 5 years, design fees have been driven down to as low as 4.5% of construction cost. There's not a lot of room for an extra 10% in there (although personally I wouldn't care if it came out of the Project Management budget).
I certainly don't disagree with what SHOULD be happening (or already have been happening all along), but I don't see who is going to pay for it.
RE: farewell to engineering education
I do have some leanings toward making things a bit more interesting and some idea of applying the theory as you go along.
Analytically/Academically I was one of the weakest of my colleagues at uni but one of the few I know of that actually went in a career designing things.
To my mind being very good at math and the like is a necessary but not sufficient qualification to be a good design engineer. Don't get me wrong, most of the best designers I've known have also be above average intellectually. However, having some fundamental interest beyond the math, and maybe a bit of a 'knack' is beneficial too.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: farewell to engineering education
ht
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: farewell to engineering education
The guys doing design are the ones who properly understood solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, etc. and went on to be able to apply them in the real world.
RE: farewell to engineering education
However, not a big enough sample to really draw any conclusions.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: farewell to engineering education
The whole engineering exercise in college was just one big math exercise. If you got the calc and diffirential calc down you were more than likely to pass all those other higher level so called control courses.
As far as freshmen bombing out, that is so typical of the adjustment to 1st year of college. Either they partied too much, never study, or just plain lazy. Nothing difficult about 1st year of college.
Maybe the problem is the college? Not the student if you ask me. I think our higher level thinkers in the ivory towers just do not know how to teach or just despise the students. I have not seen very many nice professors in college. Most are just plain mean in their attitudes toward students.
RE: farewell to engineering education
And I still think it applies today to my alma mater as I now have dealings with them at least once or twice a year as they are one of our 'partner' schools where we have provided software and resources which are used in their curriculum and as a result there are regular opportunities for myself and others to go back on campus and participate in student events and activities which are tied to our endowments and donations.
And that being said, we are in the process of preparing our 4 granddaughters for possible attendance when they finish highschool. They live in Texas and my school is back in Michigan, but since I've an alumni in good standing and if they achive certain academic levels in high school they will be allowed to attend and pay in-state or resident tuition. As part of this process we are going to be sending the two oldest girls (ages 13 and 10) to a summer program this next year where they will get a chance to experience the campus life and as well as participating in a 'exploration' of their choice, ranging from computers, to environmental awareness, basic physics and engineering, multimedia productions, geology, etc.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: farewell to engineering education
http:/
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: farewell to engineering education
I found that I could generally get good grades with about 1.5 hours of study for every hour in class in engineering. The BA in liberal arts required closer to 2 hours because of all the reading and research required.
I am a book lover, and so buy old textbooks when I see a good one. I have several from the 1930's through the 1950's, and it certainly appears that more study was involved during that time period because of the increased difficulty of the study questions.
RE: farewell to engineering education
When I took my daughter to the SAME state university 20 years later for orientation - the DEAN of students met with us. He gave us his cell number, e-mail address, home address, etc, etc. I NEVER EVER met the Dean of students when I was there!!!
They now offered all kinds of computer labs, tutor help, actually good and healthy meals.
He explained that they figured out it was cheaper to be more picky and graduate more students than the "Old" way!!
BTW - they now required 4 years of Math, English and Science as a minimum to just apply!! A couple of her friends didn't get in and this was a state university ---- Mizzou RAH!!
While we make think things are "easier" - I think they have a better "crop" of students and they are probably learning more than I did!!!.
RE: farewell to engineering education
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: farewell to engineering education
Pulling freshman math and calculus out to high school should leave room in the college curriculum to put in more engineering. I'm not certain it really works that way. My son's first year was pretty heavy on stuff like "History of Religion" (in a state school) and "Logic".
David
RE: farewell to engineering education
Maybe that would create a race to the top for a few select schools rather than a race towards mediocrity. Most schools would still be mediocre, some would excel, and those would be identifiable.
RE: farewell to engineering education
The thought is more compettion, not less, should drive the costs down to where they are more affordable.
From what I have seen is the biggest cost is houseing.