How Higher Education Advances High-tech Skills

New Jersey Business, Jun 2008 by Sheridan, Sharon

New Jersey's higher-education institutions are using hands-on experiences and combining business and technology studies to prepare students for today's high-tech world. For students, this can mean using cutting-edge equipment, collaborating with industry on research or learning how to take an invention from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, focuses on all of those principles at its Wesley J. Howe School of Technology Management. A comprehensive business school, it teaches the full range of business-school disciplines but focuses on areas such as commercializing technology, technology-based innovation, licensing technology, creating startups and managing research and development functions, says Dr. Lex McCusker, school dean.

"Stevens is particularly well-suited to this marriage of industry and education around technology education to create commercial value," he says, calling the institute's founding Stevens family the "first family of American entrepreneurs."

"We put the kids through a fairly rigorous technology foundation," plus a bachelor's degree in business program, he says, so students know how to integrate technology and business. This serves them well in a high-tech marketplace, where even mom-and-pop bagel stores can't function without electronic databases and other technology. "In this day and age, there are no companies that aren't high-tech companies," McCusker says.

Such graduates are in demand. "Our kids' average salary is about $15,000 above the national average for business students," McCusker says.

Every undergraduate goes through a design project, and faculty also create inventions. "The institute nurtures those and picks the best of them," McCusker says. Two resulting companies - HydroGlobe and PlasmaSol - have been spun off, and six to eight are in the works, he says.

"In many ways, Stevens is trying to create a different model of university," he says. "The traditional model is 'create knowledge, disseminate knowledge' ... We are keen on 'creating knowledge,' but our way of disseminating that knowledge is more likely to be to push it out in the marketplace. Stevens' faculty are much more likely to be thinking early on about what real-world problem a technology is solving rather than ... what's going to appeal to an editor of a scholarly journal."

While there's room for many different kinds of schools, he says, he thinks the Stevens approach "really is the future of American education."

Meanwhile, at St. Peter's College, Jersey City, nursing students hone their skills on the lifelike SimMan, nicknamed Pat Peters. "SimMan is a high-fidelity mannequin that can be programmed to do just about everything a patient does except show you his insurance card and walk out," says Ann Tritak, RN, Ed. D., associate dean for nursing. "We use him throughout the nursing curriculum."

Students practice interviewing their electronic patient, who answers via preprogrammed script or more spontaneously under the auspices of an instructor with a microphone in the control room. They check his vital signs, such as blood pressure and heart and lung sounds. Students even are tested on their response to a simulated emergency "code" - when the wrong actions can "kill" the patient.

"We have our lab set up with a one-way mirror, where we can watch the student," Tritak explains. The student receives a patient history and then treats "Peters," while four cameras record the process. Afterward, students are debriefed to see where they did well and where they might have made better decisions.

St. Peter's also has two slightly less advanced mannequins called Nursing Annes, and other equipment such as blood-pressure cuffs and electronic thermometers to familiarize students with technology as well as procedures such as inserting a catheter. Students learn the principles of technology and become comfortable with it in the college lab, so they're prepared for what they may find in hospitals or clinics elsewhere, Tritak says. "It's very different from when I was a student," she says. "I think the high-technology I had was a syringe and an orange."

Continuing changes to technology present a challenge for educators.

"It's very critical to prepare students for tomorrow's world, but we only have today's tools to work with," says Dianne Dorland, Ph.D., dean of the Rowan University School of Engineering, former president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and recently-named Engineer of the Year by the Delaware Valley Engineers Week Council. "Knowing that tomorrow's world is going to contain problems that we don't know about yet and is going to use technology that hasn't been invented yet is going to require that our students have a firm foundation in how to think critically, how to work on multidisciplinary teams and how to build their technical knowledge base as it continues to expand throughout their lifetime."

Glassboro-based Rowan University focuses on experiential or hands-on teaching, with juniors, seniors and graduate students participating in engineering clinics, primarily sponsored by industry. "These projects that we seek from industrial and research partners have to be real," Dorland says. "We're not looking for faculty to be able to develop a fake problem based on their previous experience. We want something that's currently a problem, a concern, a new product development." Students and faculty worked with General Mills, for example, to recommend process changes for their Dunkin' Donuts bagel line that saved the company approximately three-quarters of a million dollars a year, she says. "We have a faculty member that has just worked with a team of students to develop a pedal-powered grain grinder, and this has tremendous implications for how we might be able to get a low-cost alternative to countries all over the world, while having a significant impact on quality of life."