A Commentary on the State of Engineering Education

Sound and Vibration, Jul 2004 by Smith, Strether

Author's Note: The following editorial is made up of three parts:

1. The original draft that I wrote after seeing the Albert Kingsbury article in the October 2003 issue of S&V.

2.A discussion of responses that I received after sending the draft to several colleagues.

3. A request to all readers for follow-up.

The Original Draft. The article on Albert Kingsbury in the October 2003 issue of S&V produced a flood of memories and a host of thoughts about the past, present and future of engineering education.

Other than the clothes (wo certainly did not wear ties) Figure 1, taken in 1885, could have been of my freshman mechanical engineering classmates in 1957. As it turned out, we were the last class to use the venerable Sibley College building at Cornell. As sophomores the next year we moved across campus to sparkling new quarters (Thurston Hall named for the professor in Figure 2) that had everything except what was shown in the other pictures. The new building had drafting tables - that could not be escaped, CAD was still a long way in the future - but Thurston (and Kingsbury) probably rolled over in their graves because of what was missed.

What was lost were the dirty-hands laboratories like the foundry lab in Figure 3. The 1957 freshman class made sand molds, poured molten iron with a ladle, and made cast bookends that we could send home to our parents as evidence of how well their money was being spent. It seemed a bit trite at the time, but in retrospect, I think a mechanical engineer should know how castings are made. That critical wisdom was denied to Cornell students starting after 1957.

Cornell had other ideas about what engineers should be taught. If they were going to understand sand casting and accounting as well as solid mechanics and differential equations (not to mention ROTC), four years were not enough. So they (and MIT and a few other engineering schools) instituted a new 5-year bachelor's of engineering degree program, which was designed to construct the "complete engineer" or, at least, the beginnings of one.

Of course, reality won out. Despite the excellent preparation, the new degree did not produce any more dollars and so it was dropped. It was replaced at many schools with a 5-year track leading directly to a master's degree. This makes a lot more sense except that the world is much more complex now and maybe 6 (real) years to some sort of 'minimum' degree is more appropriate for engineers.

When I left Cornell, I was fortunate enough to blunder into an excellent experimental structural mechanics program directed by Wilfred Horton in the Aero Department at Stanford. WiIf was a British ex-patriot who had worked on the Spitfire (he made sure you knew that, and that it was the only worthwhile aircraft ever built), who had a real flair for exciting grad students in structural-experimental projects and a real talent for scaring up grants to support them - a perfect combination. Our main emphasis was on the buckling of thin shells, a hot topic in the 1960s and the studies required unique instrumentation and recording systems and that became my avocation. My career was defined and established before I left grad school. I was very fortunate, but the program left Stanford in the late 1960s.

Do today's students have the same opportunities? I might be wrong but I think that programs in experimental mechanics have essentially disappeared from many of the major colleges and universities. I hope that our readers can correct me - if so, I can point the graduates to excellent jobs. The old guys need to be replaced.

For me, and others that work in the engineering short-course business, this is a personal bonanza. We are kept busy giving multi-day seminars trying to pass some of our hard-earned knowledge on to the new doers. It is fun and rewarding for us and, I hope, the attendees.

But, it is not enough. We need real schools to provide real courses if industry is going to have laboratories that can perform good tests that provide reliable results. I think that a good foundation in sand casting is a good start toward understanding the difference between a good and a bad Shock Response Spectrum.

Reactions from Colleagues. The rough draft of this editorial produced an immediate response from Pat Walter at TCU. We exchanged several notes, and one of mine included the following paragraphs/ questions:

So, if/ they are Mechanical Engineers (or some other equally dirty-hands regimen):

1. Have they ever done any welding?

2. Have they ever operated a lathe and/ or milling machine?

3. Have they ever stuck down a strain gage?

4. Have they welded a thermocouple (And done an error analysis on the result)?

5. Can they free-hand sketch a connecting rod? (That means: can they sketch and do they know what a connecting rod is?)

6.1 assume that, under your auspices, they have stuck down an accelerometer and it was proven to provide proper results. Right? I doubt that other schools do.

I guess the bottom line for me is that, if we are developing experimental engineers, they probably are not going to be allowed to do the tasks above when they go to work (cither on a school program or "for real"). If they haven't gotten thenhands dirty with the real stuff, how will they: