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August 19, 2008
Has Engineering Education Failed?
Here we look at the concerns regarding the number and quality of engineering students heading into the workforce, from the perspective of the student, the professor and even the IMT reader.
A lot has been said in recent years about the suspected lack of engineering graduates nationally. Long-term data on the United States workforce show a trend toward increasing numbers of educated workers in science- and engineering-related occupations. During a meeting last November on the country's science and engineering workforce, Michael Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, told members of the U.S. House that there are "substantially more scientists and engineers graduating from U.S. universities" than there are jobs.
Yet a report released earlier this year says the number of students earning bachelor's degrees in engineering has declined by almost 3 percent in the U.S. over the past two decades. "While that statistic may not seem significant by itself, the decline comes at a time when the number of students receiving bachelors degrees overall in the U.S. has increased by more than 50 percent," says Greg Schuckman, director of Federal Relations and Research Advancement at the University of Central Florida and author of the study.
At the same time, a number of these degrees are awarded to foreign students, many of whom will not stay in the U.S. due to restrictive immigration laws. Other research suggests that China and India are producing many more engineers than the U.S., though much of that comes down to how a country defines "engineer."
While it's difficult to determine the makeup of young people pursuing a future in engineering today, the education versus payoff seems to be increasingly off-putting to the younger generation of engineering students.
In The Princeton Review's latest annual survey, five engineering schools made it onto the list of "Least Happy Students." On the list "Professors Get the Worst Marks," engineering schools owned the four worst spots, with Illinois Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic also landing at the bottom 10. In a category titled "Students Study the Most," engineering schools grabbed four of the top five spots. No engineering schools appeared on the list "Students Study the Least."
Many of our readers would agree that engineering curricula are hard, because of the intensity and number of study hours required, with student grades often on the low side of the bell-shaped curve. Students with low grades typically are unhappy and often tend to blame their professors.
And all of this comes at a great cost — literally.
According to the College Board, the average tuition in 2007 for a four-year state school was $6,185, and for a four-year private school was $23,712. Top-end engineering colleges have rates that are even higher. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a 2007 tuition rate of $34,750, and California Institute of Technology had a 2007 tuition rate of $31,437. These costs are expected to continue to rise year after year, and the thought of paying for four years of school at these rates can be daunting.
Surely, though, an engineering education is an investment. But is the investment worthwhile? Again, mixed results.
"Why take on a backbreaking load of student loan debt, bust your hump in a challenging course of study, then have to compete with people who are happy to be making $5.00 per hour?" an IMT reader asked in 2006.
"We find ourselves importing talent and exporting jobs, not just because it is less expensive to have the work performed by lower-wage skilled workers in developing countries but also because we do not produce enough native-born, well-qualified scientists and engineers in our nation's colleges and universities," John Brooks Slaughter, Ph.D., P.E., president and CEO of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, Inc., noted last year. (Source: American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES))
However, despite deep concerns about job security and the offshore outsourcing of engineering work to lower-cost markets — mainly in Europe and South Asia — large numbers of university students around the world are enrolled in engineering and scientific disciplines. And many of them are dreaming about potentially vast rewards if their efforts pay off professionally.
Although some surveys and reports have reported a hiring pinch so far this year, the hiring picture for some recent college graduates isn't all that bad — particularly for those with engineering degrees.
This year, engineering jobs have been the most difficult positions for employers to fill in the U.S., according to a survey released by Manpower Inc. Engineers are followed by machinists/machine operators, skilled trades and technicians, the recruitment firm says. CareerBuilder.com also claims that engineering technicians and machine operators both are among America's 10 most wanted workers right now.
For this year's graduates, engineering "may well be [among] the brightest spots," Workforce Management said last month. For engineering, "the job market is excellent," Ralph Mobley, director of career services at Georgia Tech, told Workforce Management, which went on to report:
At commencement ceremonies in May, Mobley says, nearly 72 percent of Georgia Tech's engineering grads had job offers... . He says 2001 was the Atlanta university's high point, "with 80 percent of engineering and computing grads having offers. So we're approaching that level. We pretty well reflect the national job market in engineering."
Yet another dire concern is increasingly being voiced: Are the current crop of young engineers graduating to the labor force even qualified?
"One of the great failures in engineering education has been the inability of graduating students to integrate all they have learned — science, mathematics, engineering fundamentals — in the solution of real-world engineering problems," Kevin Craig, Ph.D., a professor of mechanical engineering, wrote in a Design News editorial titled Dumbing Down the Engineer last November.
At least one IMT reader has taken issue with "the college professors that are teaching very little practical application engineering — but plenty of theory to their students. Which really does nothing to prepare the graduates for applying their skills to solving most of the problems encountered in the real world of Engineering and Design."
"I think we can all agree that true engineering is not learned in the classroom, but by experience and the absorption of knowledge from the people around us," another IMT reader wrote.
Yet this reader, Beth, has "witnessed excellent engineers being let go because they 'make too much money,' and replaced with someone that does not have a clue how to take over that position. No fault to the young engineer. . . [A]fter all, management is expecting them to run with the same projects and ideas as someone who has gained their knowledge with many years of experience."
What happens to this flock of young engineers entering the workforce without the proper guidance of a seasoned engineer to teach them the proper way to apply their skills — because "corporate America has already turned their wise, grey-haired engineers loose" through forced retirement? It's a question many of our readers are asking and a concern many industrial professionals have, as an estimated half-million new engineers may be needed over the next decade to replace those who retire.
"Is there a crisis in engineering? Yes. Is engineering being dumbed down in universities and in industry? Yes. It's a crisis that must be addressed," Professor Craig says.
Let us know the future you see for engineering education as well as workers young and old in this profession.
Earlier:
There May be a Problem, but is There Really a War?
Engineering, Science and Tech for the Pros
Redefining Engineering for the Year 2020
Drowning By Numbers: Engineering in China, India, U.S.
Are We Lacking Engineers? Or Are Engineers Lacking? (Does It Matter?)
Newsflash: There is NO Engineering Shortage
Resources
Where Will We Find the Next Generation of Engineers?
American Association of Engineering Societies, Feb. 17, 2008
Science and Engineering Indicators 2008
National Science Board, January 2008
The Best 368 Colleges - 2009 Edition
The Princeton Review, July 28, 2008
Trends in College Pricing 2007
The College Board
This Year's Graduates Face Tough Job Market
by Bridget Mintz Testa
Workforce Management, July 2008
Confronting the Talent Crunch: 2008
Manpower, 2008
America's 10 Most Wanted Workers
by Kate Lorenz
CareerBuilder.com, Feb. 22, 2008 (last updated)
Dumbing Down the Engineer
by Kevin Craig
Design News, Nov. 5, 2007
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20 Comments"Olin's innovative curriculum is the result of broad-based efforts to update engineering education for the 21st Century. Among the reforms urged by groups like the NSF and the leaders of the engineering community were increased emphasis on business, teamwork, interdisciplinary design and communications skills. Olin incorporated these reforms and other creative ideas into a new curriculum created from a clean slate with the help of 30 student "partners."
The curriculum is based on the "Olin Triangle," a combination of rigorous science and engineering fundamentals, entrepreneurship and the liberal arts. There is a deep commitment at all levels to active learning and interdisciplinary courses built around hands-on projects. At Olin, learning and doing go together from the start. This real-world approach culminates in SCOPE (Senior Consulting Program for Engineering), a significant, year-long engineering project for an actual client. "
http://www.olin.edu/academics/curriculum.asp
This is the engineering school I wished I could have attended.
August 19, 2008 12:55 PMHow do we combat the practice of BIG businesses buying up patents of new inventions and keeping them locked up and away from any utilization? There is a long history of this misappropriation of technology in our country.
Garry Owens
ATC USN Ret.
Toshiba America Consumer Products, Inc., Sr. Nat'l. Technical Trainer, Ret.
I believe one of the statistical problems is simply that engineers and scientists seem to be lumped together. Back in college, some of my engineering cohorts who decided to drop out became successful science majors. The skill-set required to graduate as a biology major are different from those necessary to major in, say, mechanical engineering. So the pure engineering statistic is more important.
I also teach engineering at a local college. My observation is that the students are very capable. No need to "dumb-down" a curriculum.
August 19, 2008 1:27 PMDespite the US having the best universities -- as long as the quality of one university is measured with the price what you have to pay to study there -- almost all the big achievements of the past century was accomplished by not US origins. Does that tell you something?
August 19, 2008 1:32 PMI have a machine job shop in the Dallas area. We desperately need trained machinists in our industry. I have found that applied skills are lacking in the manufacturing sector. Classroom instruction is only a part of the needed instruction. I agree that the application component of those classroom skills needs to be addressed and improved. Working with several entities in the Dallas area to hopefully address this issue is a project I am working on!
August 19, 2008 1:59 PMI have always said that an engineer right out of college should not design the first thing until they have spent three to five years working something like an apprenticeship. It takes some experience to understand how things go together and how they work. The CO-OP programs help, but a few semesters is not enough time to gain the experience needed to hit the ground running when hired for engineering position.
August 19, 2008 3:28 PMI am a Mechanical Designer/Drafter working in the Pittsburgh, PA. area. I have been working at a medium-sized manufacturing firm for the past 15 yrs. I have seen plenty of engineers come and go over these years..... The good ones we can't keep, the bad ones are still here.... I have had experience with engineers from both sides of the spectrum, ranging from an individual who graduated in the top two from Carnegie Mellon University, with a Mechanical Engineering Degree (he was one of the worst we hired, who finally left to pursue even higher education) to a graduate from Point Park College who was one of the best I've run across, but could not achieve a
August 19, 2008 4:08 PMThe comments and articles I have read on the Engineering Profession are pretty much true.
I graduated in 1974 and got some excellent project management experience. The choice I faced with grad studies was the choice of becoming a research scientist by going the masters-doctorate route or to do a MBA. I chose to do a MBA in 1978 and went on to become further away from engineering and closer to management.
The career required extremely hard work, dogged dedication and took a great toll on my early social development and required extensive time away from home on projects.
I consider it to be my wasted youth. I feel I have not achieved the success and satisfaction I should have been rewarded with....The engineering education failed.
Thirty years ago, engineers with practical experience were teaching....now it takes a doctorate on academic research grants to teach in engineering schools. Scientists teaching engineers and the result is academic approaches to real world problems and it does not work well, not in the real practical world.
The quantities of foreign students these days has changed the schools to something very different from the male European bunch I trained with.
The practice of engineering has changed to a corporate form quite separated from the interests of the individual. Specialization means extensive travel.
And the costs....Would it not be more advantageous to buy a house than tuition, books and housing on an engineering education then trying to recoup it later in life. The economics from an individuals point don't add up. Stable adequate funding is essential as opposed to the extremely over competitive labor market in operation now. I know many guys who abandoned engineering for more money and a much better work/life balance.
August 19, 2008 7:26 PMThe system has failed in traditional education - there is an alternative. A BS in applied science allows most to hit the ground running, e.g. engineering technology.
I graduated mechanical Engineering Technology a Old Dominion University, Norfolk VA - which you can also minor in Engineering management.
It is a pity that only about 40 states recognize it for licensure. Is a time of crisis a time for 10 states to hold elitist views on what "style" of engineering degree you have? I have personally seen someone with an applied science degree run circles around someone with a traditional degree. It should be whether you can do the work or not. And since the program is from a SACS accredited school and is an ABET accredited program - I believe the whole issue here has to do with elitism.
We also need to engage today's children in what math and science can do for society - engineering graduates are not only working in corporate america, they are future entrepreneurs that will found a new corporate america.
August 19, 2008 8:58 PMI remember when, in the early eighties, I applied for a job at Northern Telecom (Nortel). This was before the advent of the resume'. In order to make application for a job, one had to go through a pre-test and pass before being allowed to fill out an application. The pre-test consisted of 68 questions, and you were allowed no more than 6 wrong answers to qualify.
The questions on the test were of physics, geometry, math, electrical, trajectory and many other topics, including common sense.
Thirty-five people were in my group, with five practically drum-beating engineering grads that figured they were shoe-ins for passing the pre-test.
Only four people passed that test, and not one of them were the engineering grads. I was amazed that none of the grads had passed, but at the time I could only think of my good fortune. I got to find out much later why.
After being in Nortel's employ for 11 years, I was given more responsibilities due to my increased knowledge, performance and attention to detail. By this time as well, the resume had taken its' insidious hold on society, and Nortel was hiring only college grads.
The general attitude of most of the new hires was "I only test". Nice attitude. The engineering was also starting to get exceptionally poor, with an average of 70% of supposedly engineered drawings being 'red lined' and corrected on site due to structural or improper connective outlay.
Heads of engineering & installation were always happy with the results, but lower engineers would begin to exhibit resentment and managerial problems due to their ineptitude being "exposed".
I finally left the profession after 25 years, singularly fed up with supporting an evident series of engineering groups that couldn't or wouldn't be the professionals they were supposedly trained to be.
I have been in charge of multi-million dollar projects and am still solicited to this day to oversee contractors and jobs due to my experience and knowledge. But I will not accept any of them.
I see most graduates now as expecting to have everything handed to them due to the time they put in at academies of higher learning. However, there is no passion for extended learning once outside the walls of academia, or if there were any whilst inside the walls.
Most corporations would be horrified to learn I only completed Grade 10. For me, school was boring. But a love of reading and curiosity, coupled with mechanical/electrical aptitude, has taken me far beyond what most graduates have ever attained, both mentally and financially.
"A posse ad esse"
August 19, 2008 11:45 PMI found the comments in this article from Careerebuilder.com very interesting. Many of the shortages they mention could be due to the number of states closing or converting middle and high school Technology Education class (shop rooms) to computer courses. This number is alarming. This is were most students get their first taste of engineering and exposure to the use of tools and materials.
Without Technology Education, students have no idea what engineering is or what other satellite careers revolve around it... duch as engineering technician or machine operator, to mention a couple.
August 20, 2008 11:25 AMI think that undergraduate engineering educations are at least as rigorous and demanding as ever in a fast changing technical world. CAD and computer modeling have replaced inking and slide-rule derived solutions. The biggest problem is that the business world does not give the engineering profession the respect it deserves - due in part to the engineers' not taking more of a leadership role. Engineers are sometimes considered nothing more than highly trained technicians. When times are good - shortage in demand, economy sours - lay them off. Did this article ever conclude whether there was a shortage or a surplus?
August 20, 2008 7:10 PMGraduated in 2002 from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in the top quartile of my class. Tried to find a job in the midst of the tech bust, and nobody was hiring.
When I did attend interviews, the interviewers were obsessed with behavioural-descriptive interviewing techniques, and not on evaluating my engineering skills.
Still haven't been able to find a job since then, and now HR people claim that my skills are 'obsolete' (what exactly has changed much in the past 6 years? Not much, really...).
So I'm screwed basically, because because the market was poor when I graduated. And there's thousands of other people just like me.
August 22, 2008 1:35 PMWe are sending students from high school that are not very well educated. Our school systems are failing as our teachers come from the same backgrounds as the students that they are allowing to pass. Parents, government and corporations all need to share part of the blame.
We have both parents working to provide for their own gratification that todays toys provide (big screen TVs, CD players, biggest best computers, over-sized homes and cars that have more bells & whistles than anyone needs) and they are guilty of leading their children into the same traps. Our kids are, sad to say, less capable and we are the enemy.
How about as parents we give up the material goodies we do not need and take the cell phones, iPods, Gameboys and other unnecessary toys away from the kids. Maybe we could even spend time educating the little people we pump up with Ritalin. God forbid we go back to one parent working when we find out that we really don't need the all the money on can produce. Get the kids to stay home so we can have a part in their education rather than let them go to the mall and buy designer clothes and get various parts of the body pierced so they can wear a half pound of Chinese recycled pot metal.
August 22, 2008 5:40 PMDavid R. Butcher is simply wrong to be concerned with the qualification of the engineering graduates. I have been an engineer at a major defense contractor for 25 years now and the company is for the last two years, getting job applicants that are wonderful! Most have years of experience because they have been laid off from companies draining technology out of the United States.
The big problem is the utter hostility of the financial sector to American manufacturing. Without manufacturing, there is no need for engineering. The total number of people employed in high tech within the US has gone down every year except 2006 since 1998. This trend will continue down until the United States tax structure is changed to something resembling Hong Kong or Ireland. New company formation will then reverse the trend in as little as eighteen months.
In the mean time, companies and Government officials will continue to push for more and ever better qualified engineering graduates until they are better qualified than the company CEO's so they can pay engineers the same as the janitors. Do NOT take it personally, this is the way business is done. Talent should go into other professions until there is a change.
August 26, 2008 2:50 PMGregory,
What is this tax structure change that you mention?
August 26, 2008 5:53 PMAs I see it, the entire problem with engineering is there is a revolution in the manufacturing industries. I began this shop in 1989 and there were 3 other shops in town which could be justified in calling themselves a 'business';i.e. 'contract manufacturing'. There are now over 20 shops in town. However, they are what I will term as 'cottage industries'. These are shops with 1 or 2 guys with a couple of CNC machines. If they need work, they can easily underbid my pricing because they have minimal overhead. I need to pay the best wages and insurance and retirement and ??? My overhead is over $45.00 per hour. If these guys need the work they can 'buy' the job at $20.00 per hour.
This scenario forces me to look to Quality Systems, Engineering and lean methods so I can position the business away from the 'cheap' competition. That brings me to engineering. I MUST have personnel qualified at an Engineering level to do the high-tech manufacturing required by my customers. They had better be good too!
August 26, 2008 7:46 PMI think it is very interesting to listen to all of the information that has been compiled by these people that have devoted part of their lives to this field. If you listen very closely to what is said, it sounds like different companies are looking for people that fit the mold to work in the surroundings that have already been set by someone else. The field of Engineering is getting so diversified that if you study one thing you might miss what is necessary to work in a certain plant.
I have spent 35 years repairing what Engineers have built. If I had to guess, 80% of all the machinery came from overseas. Companies are looking for cheap labor and most of the people that have the manual labor jobs came from another country. So why would a kid right out of Engineering School want to take a job that is under an Engineering title that an out-of-the-country Graduate would do for less than half what is needed to even pay his schooling debt back?
I would not recommend that anyone take an Engineering field if it is going to be underpaid or they are not in a position to make some changes. There might be some Engineering jobs out there but a lot of fancy writing can get someone a job that they might not be capable of doing.
I am not belittling anyone's position because I know that what is done out in the work field is to keep your job. I have went through the stage of testing to find someone that can do the work that is necessary. But if the funds aren't available you have to go with the cheapest bidder. All of the letters that were written before this should really be listened to because being in this field of Engineering is no easy task. All the work that is done needs to be done as a team.
August 28, 2008 4:03 AMIn the present world, almost in all continents, the graduate engineering has become a cake walk because of low standards of education compared to other developments for the students.The technology is changing day by day, the students also growing with generation but the standard of education doesn't. In my opinion, the students have to acquire sufficient knowledge before entering into undergraduate courses as well as graduate courses so that they can compete with the new technology there itself. For that, the standard of education should also improve at each stage. At least some institutions should make the syllabus suitable enough for the competers and change system.
This helps the next generation to become researchers and scientists at early stages and do something to the world and to themselves.
September 2, 2008 1:51 AMI deplore the fact that, probably, the majority of more recent engineering graduates can't attack, much less solve, a problem unless they can run it on a computer program. They are not equipped to study anything through thought, intuition and experience. I too was one of those unfortunates let go after 25 years and my replacement had to rely on a spreadsheet he constructed of my work.
I think the quality of English grammar and syntax countrywide is likewise deplorable. This is not surprising considering what is seen in print and on television. Engineers might improve their credibility and hiring attractiveness by leading a crusade to improve in those English skills.
