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".

 

[ZTGR]

Farewell indeed.
The disappointment is when you spend a lot of money, time, stress, and hard work to graduate as an engineer, and you spend 10 to 15 years gaining experience to find out that the pay is not rewarding!! it is equivalent to any other average career. We as professional engineers should work hard on developing and fortifying this career and encourage juniors instead of taking advantage of them. After being a powerful career, rewarding, and prestigeous, we have worked hard to push away student, take advantage of juniors, making other engineers look bad. JUST WATCH AND LEARN FROM MEDICAL DOCTORS.

 

[2dye4]

Nothing more than a symptom of societies diminishing need for us.

If the market rewarded engineering excellence with pay then engineering excellence we would have.

Remember there are two sides to the demand issue. One side thinks long term and wrings its hands over the loss of talent with a worried eye toward yet unforeseen problems we may face.

Nobody listens to these people, never have never will..

The other side optimizes the needed resources on a short term basis through market demand and the price / salary method that is so very effective in utilizing resources most effectively in the short term.

The market wants more,cheaper,faster people cause large scale problems are "somebody eases" problems.

 

[HDS]

Sounds like an Engineering Technology program to me.

The part about making it fun is great. The bit about ignoring the physics and math means it is no longer engineering.

 

[FeX32]

HDS,
You have it correct. Ignoring all the hard parts of engineering means it's not engineering anymore.
My question to these persons proposing this. What will we do in 20 years when we have more engineers, but 99% of them can't solve a DE or know what MP pseudo inverse in linear algebra is? ect. (insert anything else useful in mathematics or physics). This will certainly slow down R&D to a halt.


Fe

 

[GregLocock]

Oh, do you think books will have been banned by then?

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[FeX32]

LOL. Greg


Fe

 

[ronbert]

The university I graduated from was known as an engineering school. Out of a class of 450; 350 were engineers.
Since I graduated the number of graduates has risen to 700+. The number of engineers graduating has dropped to 21. I understand from my business partner that the same thing has happened at his university (Georgia Tech.) The US is graduating a lot of liberal arts majors!

Our company has difficulty recruting engineers in the 35-50 age group. We are told by the recruiting companies there are very few graduates in this age group.

 

[moltenmetal]

ronbert: no kidding, the people you're having difficulty recruiting weren't hired as fresh grads. So: how many fresh grads is your firm hiring right now? How many did they hire 15-25 years ago?

I don't know what the situation is in the 'States, but here in Canada we already have 2/3s of eng grads working outside the engineering profession. The kids that are choosing something else for their university education are simply responding to what the market has been telling them for a long time now.

Here in Canada, engineering enrollments on a national basis are growing at least at the rate of population growth. It may be that graduation rates for all programs are growing even faster than that, as more and more kids (correctly) conclude that you need at least a university degree of some sort to have a hope of getting a job in the present economy.

 

[HDS]

BTW Engineering Technology programs are popular around here. Biggest difference is how far you can go with advanced degrees or a P.E. I have worked with (and for) many guy with that degree who produced good designs.

 

[2dye4]

ronbert

I have to ask why you are targeting a certain age group for hiring.

(35-50)???

 

[RossABQ]

Mid-level engineers are who you target when you want someone who can hit the ground running, for an immediate need.

I hired about a dozen recent grads over the years; their ultimate success had little to do with which school they went to, and everything to do with personal motivation. But none of them could be expected to produce much for at least 6 months.

 

[moltenmetal]

RossABQ: my apologies in advance. This post isn't going after you personally, but rather is in response to the point of view that your post seems to express. It's one that I've heard repeatedly from other people who hire engineers over the years, and it's one that I think is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the sad mess that our profession has found itself slipping into over the past sixty years.

"mid level engineers are who you target when you want someone who can hit the ground running, for an immediate need..."

What you mean is that mid-level engineers are what EVERY business wants. Mid level people are the sweet spot of cost versus productivity. You don't want fresh grads because they take time before they produce, and you don't want people too near the end of their career because they cost too much and might not stick around long enough before they retire.

Businesses tend to react better than they plan, and hence they very frequently find themselves with "immediate needs". Yeah, yeah, I know- the current business environment is so fast-paced, investors have a short attention span, projects come and go so quickly that there's no way you can plan your way around these sorts of needs etc. etc. Remind me again: how is your firm any different than any other firm in terms of what its preferences are?

"None of them (recent grads) could be expected to produce much for at least 6 months..."

What you mean again is that you want someone else to train the fresh grads so that your firm can reap the benefit- but since they all want exactly the same thing that your firm wants, nobody is obliging! Six months of poor productivity? Wow, that's rough- even assuming they do NOTHING for the first 6 months, that's a whopping $25-$30,000 investment into an employee- that'll take FOREVER to pay back! Out of curiosity, what do you pay a decent headhunter for a mid-level candidate?!

So: these mid-level engineers that you so desperately want- the ones who someone else hired when they were fresh grads: how much of a premium over a median engineering salary are you offering for their ability to "hit the ground running"? 25%? 50%? Oh... actually 0%? The sexiness of your business alone should be sufficient to attract them? And you say there's a shortage of them willing to jump ship from the people who hired them in the first place? Wow, what a surprise?!

You seem to want what everyone in business wants: a "flexible" labour force. Read this to mean a profession running with a significant level of steady state unemployment, whose workforce is cowed and willing to wait in line to take anything offered. Unfortunately, engineers are actually relatively smart people, with at least a little intellectual flexibility and some skills that are transferrable to other endeavours. When the labour market indicates that they are not needed as engineers, especially right after they graduate, they leave the profession and find something else to do. You can't store them against some future need like water behind a dam.

So: here we find ourselves, with 2/3s of Canadian engineering graduates working outside engineering or engineering management, a Canadian labour market study which has as one of its primary conclusions that we have a "critical shortage of entry-level engineering jobs", and employers still screaming "shortage!"- and using the temporary foreign workers program to satisfy their "need" for mid-level engineers. And of course- the solution is to encourage even MORE young people to pursue engineering as a career option!

 

[RossABQ]

No offense taken, I recognize the situation as being what you describe. But that reality is one of the results of increased competitive pressures built up over the last 20 yrs., combined with an expectation of new college grads (NCGs) that they make money right out of school that (IMO) is disproportionate to their real value in a production environment.

The reality is not many firms operate with a horizon 20 years down the road; few boards of directors see beyond the next quarter or annual report. Few clients are interested in establishing a working relationship that will last beyond the immediate project, if they have to pay even 2% more.

If you see a solution, I'd like to hear it.

 

[graybeach]

Another issue with mid level engineers is the notion that becoming a Project Manager should be the pinnacle of an engineer’s career. Young engineers are bombarded with the pressure to climb the project management career ladder because actually engineering something, actually figuring stuff out, is considered dreary low level minutia. The way to get ahead is to figure out how to delegate all that messy design stuff and become a manager ASAP.

This results in a shortage of engineers who know how hammer out details and can train a junior engineers to do so. It also results in junior engineers who only want to learn CPM schedules and the like.

 

[moltenmetal]

Ross: solutions? Either start hiring more young people and formally training them, or subcontract your engineering to people who have figured this situation out. There are some firms whose boards of directors understand that their choices are limited to hiring young people and training them or to get out of the business entirely.

Better get used to doing it now, as when the baby boomers retire you'll have little choice in the matter, and nobody will be left to train the kids.

As to the demand for entry-level salaries that are not justified in terms of performance: I don't know what your own local situation is, but I know the following in relation to my own province in Canada:

1) Entry level salaries for engineers, on average, have not grown as fast as the economy or as the CPI, and

2) Just like 20 years ago, an entry level engineer still makes in real dollars (taking into account the time value of money) about 1/2 what an engineer does after 10 years of experience, at which point their salary grows more or less only at the rate of inflation unless they escape to the rarefied air of the "business world".

3) I don't think that the real productivity of engineers has decreased over the past 20 years, except perhaps as a result of nostalgic thinking that everyone is prone to.

In reality, much of the routine work a senior engineer does can be delegated to a number of juniors. Voila- drudgery shared becomes a learning experience! This is not scaleable ad infinitum, of course- there's a span of control that works, and a span beyond which it collapses into a horrible, costly mess. That span varies with the nature of the work etc.

One thing is sure: the ratio of young to old in the engineering workforce is going to have to increase, big time, due to demographic pressures alone. Not everyone is going to want to delay retirement, and those who do are not often going to be your most desirable and productive workers.

The firms that realize and adapt to this rather predictable fact of life have a hope of survival going forward. The rest...the light they see at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlamp of an oncoming train.

One thing is sure: recruiting more young-uns into the profession without first addressing the factors which drive employers to NOT hire them is utter folly. It's not in the interest of the profession or of the public purse which usually subsidizes this education to some degree.

 

[RossABQ]

Molten, your description of salaries doesn't seem to be out of line with what I have seen.

Straight out of school, a Mech or Chem engineer in a historically lower-wage area can expect to get offers in the $55 - $60k range. A senior engineer (registered PE, 20+ yrs) makes as low as $90k to as high as $130k (I'm including gov't engineers but excluding Principals in a firm). So RCG's are getting darn near half what the top of the range is, straight out of school. There are two local gov't offices that go out of their way to hire the valedictorian in Chemical Engineering, and have paid as much as $80k plus a $10 - $20k signing bonus. No profit-making company could match that, I'm certain, not in this market.

Even at (say) $55k, how many of them can a dept. with 1 senior engineer, 3 mid-level engineers, some Designers and Drafters, afford to keep on board? Just one would represent a 5 - 10% dilution of productivity (initially at least). For the last 5 years, design fees have been driven down to as low as 4.5% of construction cost. There's not a lot of room for an extra 10% in there (although personally I wouldn't care if it came out of the Project Management budget).

I certainly don't disagree with what SHOULD be happening (or already have been happening all along), but I don't see who is going to pay for it.

 

[KENAT]

Well, I don't have much sympathy for cancelling any genuinely required advanced classes or arbitrarily making things 'easier' etc. however...

I do have some leanings toward making things a bit more interesting and some idea of applying the theory as you go along.

Analytically/Academically I was one of the weakest of my colleagues at uni but one of the few I know of that actually went in a career designing things.

To my mind being very good at math and the like is a necessary but not sufficient qualification to be a good design engineer. Don't get me wrong, most of the best designers I've known have also be above average intellectually. However, having some fundamental interest beyond the math, and maybe a bit of a 'knack' is beneficial too.

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[JohnRBaker]

For what it's worth:

http://machinedesign.com/article/tough-engineering-courses-now-make-headlines-1208

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

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To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Hurricanes]

I can't say I agree with KENATs comments above (unless he is talking about designers as in draughters). Pretty much every single C grade average student in my year has gone on to be a project engineer. Eg. glorified manager.

The guys doing design are the ones who properly understood solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, etc. and went on to be able to apply them in the real world.

 

[KENAT]

No I mean designing things rather than going into IT, or management consulting, or project management or govt testing...

However, not a big enough sample to really draw any conclusions.

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