Page 175 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
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158 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

One of the best papers I read at Chicago suggested that we will
never run out of any natural resource, as long as market forces are al-
lowed to work. As relative scarcity raises the price, conservation, and
more important, the development of new supplies and substitutes
(which is what engineers are so darn good at doing) will take care of the
problem. The point is that engineering and free-market economics nec-
essarily advance hand-in-hand. The extreme case of communist coun-
tries, where market forces and the profit motive were closed off, proves
the point. They resorted to stealing technology because they were un-
able to create it.
Unless the importance of free markets is understood, engineering
can easily go the wrong way. The 2020 report quotes the Guiding Prin-
ciples for Green Engineering, many of which read like Communist Party
slogans. For example, Principle #6 is: “Strive to Prevent Waste.” (I think
I’ll put that up on my living room wall in bright red letters.) But that
statement is non-operative. The trouble is that striving itself is wasteful
if the waste saved is not worthwhile. And how would one measure in
the absence of a price for the waste? Again, engineers need market prices,
not black-and-white regulations, to make correct, “unwasteful,” eco-
nomic decisions, and engineers should inject themselves forcefully into
this very public debate.
While we’re on the subject of waste, there is a form of waste in
engineering that I think everyone will agree must be reduced. I was
stunned to read that if all entering freshmen completed their engineer-
ing degrees, the number of graduates would increase by an astonishing
40 percent. To put that in the parlance of total quality management, the
failure rate of American engineering departments is two out of five—
hardly 6 sigma. If a for-profit company had a failure rate that high, it
would go out of business. Something is terribly wrong here, and it must
be fixed. Perhaps part of the fix is better preparation and better selection
of students before they enter an engineering program.
Engineers have always yearned for more respect from, and author-
ity in, society. They still clamor for it, I suspect. But if an answer has
been to make engineers better engineers by making them more human,
it is equally true that to make humans better humans they must become
better engineers. (My sloganeering is definitely competing with Chair-
man Mao.) We must begin earlier imparting the mind-set of engineer-
ing to all students, not just engineering students, to help them under-
stand the merits of using rational, economic models and discourse to
solve problems, even before they enter college but also while they are in

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