Page 136 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

HISTORY OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION REFORM 119

many engineers—notably Stanford’s Frederick Terman—to press for
more math, physics, and engineering science for all students.
To ensure that engineers would never again lag behind physicists,
degrees were offered in engineering science and engineering physics.
New fields, such as nuclear engineering, computer science, and interdis-
ciplinary materials science were evidence of how the new approaches to
engineering would unfold. Three schools decided that the only way to
ease the demands on students was to lengthen the curriculum to five
years. Cornell, Ohio State, and Minnesota made the switch, promising
that their graduates would be much better prepared for the new world
of engineering. Their competitors contended that in four full years, stu-
dents could do the same work and be employed a whole year sooner. All
three schools quietly ended the experiment after only a few years
(Cornell University Archives, 1948).
Ironically, almost every engineering college moved toward a post-
war curriculum that meant engineering students spent nearly five years
in school. This led Eric Walker, dean of engineering at Penn State in the
late 1940s and president of that school from 1956 to 1971, to press for
change. Walker was aware that every other profession required a gradu-
ate degree for admission to professional status. As president of the
American Society of Engineering Education in the mid-1960s, Walker
launched the Goals Study (Walker and Nead, 1966)—another review
of the state of engineering education—an intensely controversial report
that proposed addressing overloaded curricula by instituting a general-
ized undergraduate degree and reserving specialization for the master’s
level (an idea that Dartmouth adopted and has practiced for decades).
Toward the end of his life, Walker argued that, given the impor-
tance of technology to modern society, this change would allow engi-
neering to become the “liberal arts degree” of the twenty-first century.
By not specializing, undergraduates would have time for a broad educa-
tion that would prepare them for leadership positions in society and
business. By the 1990s, discussions about the relationship of under-
graduate and graduate work in engineering were under way in a number
of venues (Van Dam, 1990; Walker, 1989).
Walker’s line of thinking was in keeping with the other main issue
confronting engineers concerned with reforming the content of engi-
neering curricula—the place and shape of general education. The issue
of general education has dogged engineering educators every bit as much
as how much science and math to incorporate and how to teach engi-

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