From engineering companies and universities to the National Science Foundation, a consensus is emerging about the widening gap between the realities of modern practicing and engineering education. The big challenge becomes how best to close that gap to meet the needs of engineering students, their future employers and their contributions.

David E. Goldberg, president of Big Beacon, a non-profit for transforming engineering education, and professor emeritus of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois, who co-wrote the book A Whole New Engineer, says he has felt the disconnect between engineering education and practice as far back as his first job for an engineering software company in the 1970s. On his first day, Goldberg received a set of manuals from his boss with instructions to travel to Chicago to make a sales call with another representative from the company.

“I did it,” Goldberg recalls, “but none of my education had prepared me for the non-engineering side. I felt that mismatch, and those mismatches have gotten worse. In this world, more and more students graduate from engineering college and are asked to be fully assembled so that they can work with customers, on teams and on all of the technical aspects.”

Since the mid-20th century, according to Goldberg, three revolutions have occurred: the entrepreneurial revolution, the quality revolution and the information-technology revolution.

“The industry has been profoundly changed by them, but the universities are still rocking like it's 1955 in many ways,” Goldberg says, acknowledging that today’s engineers are a different breed.

“We see engineering as more about being entrepreneurial,” Goldberg says. That means engineers are expected to be creative, find solutions and ask the right questions. The profession has changed quite a lot, Goldberg says, "but we are still educating the engineer to sit down, shut up and be obedient.”

Others say that retooling the engineering education system may not be required. “In some respects, the engineer’s job hasn’t changed at all,” says John Buchowski, product designer at IHS Technology. “Fundamentally, engineering’s core issue is to understand the problem and find a solution for it." What has changed, he says, is the amount of information and tools available for engineers to use in problem-solving.

One of the challenges posed by the internet is the amount of content being created on a daily basis and the way that engineers sift through this information to find the "knowledge that drives their decision-making,” Buchowski says.

To be sure, industries are seeking engineers equipped with the skills to handle such challenges.

“Today's engineers are faced with a very fast moving world and therefore they need to be lifelong learners,” says Marcy Alstott, vice president of operations for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Grabit Inc., which specializes in electroadhesion technology for material handling and warehouse automation. Engineers need more agility and flexibility than in the past to keep up with changes in tools, technologies and techniques. "They need," she says, "more integrative ability" to take concepts from multiple disciplines to solve problems.

Engineering as Team Sport

Proponents of transforming engineering education emphasize the importance of technical skills but note several critical missing components. “Engineers 30 or 40 years ago really had to have a very good understanding of math and science,” says Diran Apelian, a mechanical engineering professor and director of the Metal Processing Institute at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Mass. “You still need that, but today to really succeed you need to understand social sciences and the human dimension

One increasingly important skill is collaboration. As Goldberg says, “Engineering really is a team sport, by and for human beings." But there is almost no emphasis on that in universities, he says. The earlier the teamwork aspect is implemented, the more effective it will be.

WPI students competed for a $1.5-million NASA prize. Here, a student tests a lunar sample retriever under a judge's watchful eye. Source: WPI“Collaboratively working in teams means not having to figure things out on your own, but how to learn that while you are becoming an engineer at the undergraduate level,” says Apelian, who co-wrote the book Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century with his colleague Grétar Tryggvason.

At WPI, first-year engineering students take a class that requires them to work with a team of peers on the project. The final grade is not determined by work of the best student, but rather the weakest person on the team.

“The modality changes and now you have to make the weakest person on your team do well so then you will do well,” Apelian says. He says, however, that such concepts need to be taught in more than one course.

Equally important is putting choices in the students’ hands. Several years ago, Goldberg and colleagues at the University of Illinois taught a one-credit course in which first year-students were placed on teams according to their aspirations. The class then asked their professors what they wanted them to do. In turn, Goldberg and colleagues responded, “Tell us what you want to do, and then go build something on that.”

“No one had ever really asked the students what they wanted or held them accountable for learning what they wanted to learn,” Goldberg says. At first, students rejected the idea because it was so foreign, he says. "But once they realized the power of it, there was an explosion of passion. They went out into the world and made things happen.”

The experience taught Goldberg the value of bringing emotion into engineering. “At the core of the future of engineering education, we want to move away from the traditional model of obedience, and that starts with trust. Trust that students have the courage to do something, to fail and to succeed, and have the courage to do it again,” he says. “Some of my engineering colleagues think it’s strange for me to use the ‘L’ word, but it actually starts in loving and believing in these young people in a way we haven’t before.”

Such engagement needs to start as soon as an undergraduate arrives on campus, Apelian says. “The experience you get as a first-year engineering student in most universities is one of, ‘Let’s see whether you can make it in engineering,’” he says. First-year curricula tend to focus on math and basic sciences and less so on engineering disciplines or issues related to engineering. "So they take their preparatory courses to get into their area of interest, but it causes a great deal of consternation," Apelian says. "They get turned off and go into other fields.”

In addition to its first-year course that introduces engineers to teamwork, WPI offers Great Problem Seminars. In the first half of the semester-long course, students learn about large societal issues such as energy, water, transportation and healthcare. In the second half, students work with an organization on a project related to one of these core topics.

“They are not disassociated. They are not disenfranchised,” Apelian says. “Right away, the first year they connect, and that is what most universities deny them.”

Additionally, Apelian encourages engineering schools to send their students abroad for international learning opportunities. More than 50 percentof engineering and science students at WPI spend two months overseas working full-time on an experiential, research-intensive project that requires critical thinking and evidence-based writing.

“Understanding different cultures is going to be important once students start their careers,” Apelian says.

Engineering Education for the Real World

All of these skills line up, with the needs of many companies that employ young engineers. “The adequately prepared are those who have opened up their education to include more than simple classroom work,” says Grabit’s Alstott. “Those who have worked overseas, have led in student organizations or have worked during their education tend to have more resiliency and practical ingenuity.”

IHS’s Buchowski sees the benefits of real-world applications playing out in engineering firms. “The more real-world experience a graduate can get, the better value they can bring into the organization that hires them,” he says. “These days, you’re spending less time with new engineers doing on-the-job training, and they’re becoming members of the engineering team much more quickly.”

In tandem with real-world experience comes the ability to adapt to diverse situations. “We need to hit a bit harder on the pace of change and the agility required to remain pertinent in the engineering profession,” Buchowski says. The notion of lifelong learning is no longer nice to have; it is a requirement. "Everybody is building off of everybody else's innovation, and that just makes the pace of change faster.”

Even with well-prepared engineering graduates, some companies find it difficult to recruit the right fit. “There’s definitely a gap in the market and a scarcity of top engineering talent,” says Keith Wolf, managing director at Murray Resources, a recruiting firm in Houston. “You have the baby boomer generation of engineers nearing retirement, and it takes time for engineering graduates to get up to speed and gain the experience to fill those roles.”

Buchowski says that although engineering schools are properly preparing their graduates for the realities of the profession, it’s unfair to expect them to predict the future. “Engineering schools can’t look into a crystal ball and assume that they know better than the industry on what skills are going to be required in the future." He says the best way to approach is to conceive of partnerships between business and academia and establish programs where those two entities work hand in hand.

On the academic side, the push to re-engineer engineering education has its critics. Proponents acknowledge some of the roadblocks to shifting the academic mindset.

“The approach is labor-intensive, it is an expensive model and it requires an extra effort from the staff, as well as willingness from senior professors to participate,” Apelian says.

Even small steps, like the addition of a one-credit introductory course designed to engage engineering students, can prompt students to view engineering through a different lens. Opportunities for the real-world experience, for international travel to problem solve in a different culture, improved communications and multidisciplinary collaborations throughout the course of engineering education, all may help to make future engineering professionals a lot more innovative.

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