Re-Engineering Engineering Education for the Challenges of the 21st Century

JOM, Oct 2006 by Tryggvason, Gretar, Apelian, Diran

INTRODUCTION

Engineering education and the profession are confronting a challenging crossroad. Some of us see it as a crisis, others, as an opportunity for positioning our community and our society for the 21 st century. It would he fair to say, however, that none of us are very satisfied with the status quo and what seems to be facing us in the near term. As Charles Dickens wrote in the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".

Author and journalist Thomas Friedman has declared that the world is now fiat.1 Globalization of the economy has amplified the impact of technology on modern societies in ways that could not have been predicted. The connectivity provided by the Internet has generated new markets for products and services, hut has also made available labor that is often both educated and cheap. This is likely to have a profound impact on the distribution of wealth in both the developed and the developing parts of the world and may. in particular, alter the socioeconomic structure of countries where the general well-being of the population has been taken for granted. That education plays a role in the prosperity of nations is not debated, but many authors, like Landes,2 for example, argue that it is specifically the presence of both knowledge and know-how that determines how well off societies are. The education of engineers is therefore critical to every nation to ensure the prosperity of its citizens.

The modern professional identity of engineers emerged in the early 18th century with the establishment of the Ecole Polytechnique in France and the foundation of professional engineering societies in England. The current way of educating engineers, including the structure of the curriculum, was already established by the early 20th century, but the course content has. of course, changed significantly since then. The last major shift in engineering education in the United States goes back over half u century when the role of science in the educational program increased significantly.1 Although some evolution certainly has taken place, those changes are relatively modest and the basic structure and course content of a modern engineering program is very familiar to someone educated in the sixties.

The time for another major re-examination of engineering education is overdue. Countless committees, task forces, panels, and commissions have already addressed the need and eloquently emphasized that the competitiveness of the country ami therefore the general standard of living hinges on the ability to educate a large number of suflieiently innovative engineers (see. lor example. References 4-8). Figure I clearly shows (he concern with respect to manufacturing production, especially when comparing the production in the United States to Japan and China." This is even more concerning when one considers that creation of wealth is related to a nation's ability to make products that other nations want to purchase.

That the world has changed in fundamental ways during the last decade or two is self-evident. Computers have completely altered the way we live and work. They have, in particular, transformed our ability to deal with information and data. We are now moving rapidly toward a world where, for all practical purposes, we can process information inlinilely fast, store an infinite amount of data, and transmit data instantaneously, to paraphrase a statement made by Henry B. Schacht. the first chairman and chief executive officer of Lucent Technologies Inc. in hiscommencement speech at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Worcester. Massachusetts, in 2001.

As a result of the emergence of the Internet, knowledge has been "communalized." Everybody has access to information about anything and. perhaps equally importantly, knowledge is no longer "owned" by the experts. High school students can. and do. write articles on Wikipedia. just like the professors. This change has already transformed industries and raised fundamental questions about authorship and ownership of information and scholarly works. Computers have also empowered the average man and woman to create products that previously required large corporations with significant resources. In many aspects of digital media we have now reached the point that if we can imagine it. we can create it. As computer speed and software advances, this trend will continue and in 20 years or so it is very likely-almost certain, actually-that a high-school student with a laptop and a little bit of time will have the capability to create a full-length animated movie with virtualactorsofthequality currently only produced by major movie makers. The same transformation is likely to happen to the creation of engineered artifacts, although the time frame may he somewhat longer. Ordering components through the Web and receiving them in the mail is now part of everyday life and c-manufacturing-where the customer sends an electronic description of a part to a manufacturer, who makes it and mails it hack-is emerging.