farewell to engineering education 7

[davefitz]

just heard a program on NPR , involving an interview with some MIT professors and other education "experts"- the current fear that too many eng school freshman are leaving the engineering curriculum due to difficulties adjusting to the discipline required led to their recommendation that:

-to retain more freshman, the curriculum should be modified to make it easier, to allow the student's "inherent creativity" to be expressed from the first day of the first class , and to postpone or cancel the teaching of fundamental physical principles .

- we saw this movie before- the exact same philosophy was applied to elementary and high school curriculum in the late 1960's in the US, and we now have a nation of drooling Ipod ticklers.

Well, have to get back to watching " dancing with the stars".

 

[CastMetal]

Do you expect anything else from a revenue driven education system? If you flunk out of engineering at MIT chances are your not going to switch majors to English Lit and continue to pay MIT level tuition. They see it as a loss of revenue every time a student leaves engineering not maintaining high standards.

(Politically/economically unfeasible musing ahead)

A dramatic shift would be what if institutions received a percent of graduates earnings in lieu of tuition?

Say 3% a year over your working life? The incentive for universities to produce superior graduates is increased. Students no longer hold equal value to the university monetarily speaking. Retaining the 3 or 4 failing engineering students that may work as a CAD jockeys for 30 years at 40k-60k a year is no longer as important as pushing the top of the class on to make into the six figures.

Obviously academic achievement in practice has a smaller correlation to monetary success than may be necessary for any system like this to work. Yet there is something appealing about universities earnings being tied to success of their graduates not the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.



Comprehension is not understanding. Understanding is not wisdom. And it is wisdom that gives us the ability to apply what we know, to our real world situations

 

[zdas04]

A couple of years after I finished Nuclear Power School the Navy lowered the minimum test scores for admission by 2.5%. That allowed about 12% more folks to qualify for admission. This led to a very slight lowering of the school's expectations. Number of students graduating went up by about 4%. When the guys under the new rules got to the fleet, no one had told us that the delicate darlings should be cut some slack so we didn't (we wouldn't have anyway, it was our own lives on the line after all). The number of folks that simply could not qualify as a nuclear watch stander went from 0-1 in each class to 2-3 in each class. Net result of reducing the harshness of the initial culling was to significantly increase the harshness of the final culling (dropping out of Nuclear Power School was kind of hard on your self image, but you would have a LOT of company, being dropped after finishing a year of training was devastating).

I think that the education "experts" in the above discussion consider "success" as the number of bodies that pay for 4 years of education and get a diploma. No consideration of whether the graduates have enough knowledge to be able to qualify to contribute in a demanding field.

David

 

[MintJulep]

Expectations only lead to disappointment since they are so rarely met.

Or so I've been told.

 

[TheTick]

The Masonic lodges in my state recently instituted an "easier" program that did not require as much memory work. The encouraging thing is that there arre still a large proportion of candidates that really do want to do it the traditional "hard" way.

 

[moltenmetal]

The unis around here already consider engineering to be "the new liberal arts education", i.e. having nothing to do with educating engineers. The employment stats tell me they're right in doing so. 2/3rds of the grads do something other than engineering already.

I see the day coming when there's a five year program for people who actually want to work as engineers, and 4 yr program for everybody who merely wanted something that sounds like it was harder to do than a Bachelors degree in physics or chemistry.

 

[YoungTurk]

The impact will be the same as I'm already expecting as a result of the degree mills which pollute the education system. More and more employers will need to not only consider the degree and grades, but they will need to consider the accreditation and school / program reputation to get any inkling of the worth of a candidate's education.

Unfortunately, accreditation by ABET or similar only says that a minimum standard is met and doesn't help differentiate good programs from OK programs. Even just within the US, there are so many accredited programs operating across such a broad spectrum of competencies that this task will be challenging for employers.

Also -

farewell to emgineering education

Tell me that title was intentional...

 

[MiketheEngineer]

You get what you pay for or what you work for!!

 

[FeX32]

Farewell indeed.


Fe

 

[cranky108]

At least they will no longer need to have tests, or grades, just like our public schools.

And with on-line schools, there maybe even price compettion.

Wow is this how the Roman empire ended?

 

[FeX32]

Wow is this how the Roman empire ended?

You would think that it would go the other way. That is, as we evolve our society the quality of things like education would increase not decrease.
It is interesting how human nature is often misinterpreted and/or malformed by humans themselves.

About uni. engineering education in particular. I think things like quality/structure are too often decided by those misinformed or driven by factors other than quality (unfortunately). These individuals are also likely to not have an engineering degree and/or know nothing of what engineers do, so they care not. A factor not included is the individual. ie. one particular student may get much more out of an education then another who scrapes by. So even if they degrade the education system in the US in the future, there is likely still to be good engineers. There will just be more bad ones.
At least we know things can always change. Like a friend of mine always says with much vulgar. "Piss on them" LOL.



Fe

 

[zdas04]

Fex32,
I think you've hit on the essence of the future--there will still be good engineers, but the number of bad ones is sure to increase.

My problem with that is that far too many of the bad ones will find themselves in positions of real power as "government engineers". I've seen a real increase in the number of government positions for engineers over the last couple of decades. Typically the jobs are "oversight" or "inspector" jobs, but WAY too many of them have the power to kill good projects using the pocket veto. If you don't suck up to these worthless slugs then your paperwork will tend to find the bottom of in boxes, get routed to the wrong desk, and be rejected because the margins are too narrow (or too wide). Complain to their boss (or your congressman) and your projects will slow down even more.

I've seen a few quality engineers in these roles, but they don't tend to stay around very long. The skills that make someone a competent engineer are very different from the skills that make someone a competent bureaucrat.

David

 

[badgerdave]

@zdas04 "competent bureaucrat"=oxymoron =]


-Dave

 

[graybeach]

I've seen the opposite - a real decrease in the number of government positions for engineers, at least at agencies like DOTs and Utilities. Instead we have more VPs of cultural diversity and more directors of community outreach, etc. Not saying that's bad, but someone's got to know when a bridge really does need to be closed.

One thing that is nice about being an engineer is that gray hair still counts. Watering down engineering education, will only make it count more.

 

[Maui]

The ones who drop out of the engineering program will likely find their way into business school instead. This is what happened where I attended university, and I have seen it happen other places as well. Many of these technologically challenged individuals will end up with an MBA. And then the unthinkable happens: they are hired to supervise a team of engineers, and are tasked with making the final call on engineering decisions.

I have lived this in more than one job. It is deeply disturbing to watch these people repeatedly make decisions that fly in the face of sound engineering judgement, even after they are presented with the facts that would dictate that their decision is severely flawed.

And I don't see this scenario improving with the news that davefitz shared. Farewell to engineering indeed.

Maui

http://www.EngineeringMetallurgy.com

 

[SnTMan]

You know, you could easily believe it of any number of schools, but MIT?

If true there's no hope.

Regards,

Mike

 

[GregLocock]

Do you think students might object to paying 10s of thousands of dollars in tuition every year to play with Lego?





Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[SnTMan]

Not if there's a degree in it

 

[cranky108]

The slow decay of a nation, when taking a shortcut seems like a good idea.

If you want to see engineers with no idea what they are doing, just look for an MBA on top of the engineering degree.

There are more engineering positions in goverment regulations, just look at NERC, and FERC. Who are trying to make all power system decisions as easy as following a set of guidelines.

 

[FeX32]

The skills that make someone a competent engineer are very different from the skills that make someone a competent bureaucrat.

Perfectly said.


Fe