Page 178 - 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

EDUCATING ENGINEERS FOR 2020 AND BEYOND 161

There was no World Wide Web. Cell phones and wireless communica-
tion were in the embryonic stage. The big challenge was the inability of
the American manufacturing sector to be competitive in world markets.
Japan was about to bury us economically. The human genome had not
been sequenced. There were no carbon nanotubes. Buckminster
Fullerines had been around for about three years. We hadn’t even started
to inflate the dot-com bubble, let alone watch it burst. And terrorism
was something that happened in other parts of the world—not on our
shores.
All this is to say that predicting the future, or even setting meaning-
ful goals, is a risky business . . . even on a scale of a mere 16 years. Years
ago, I read that an author who made a study of predictions of the future
found one simple invariant. We always underestimate the rate of tech-
nological change and overestimate the rate of social change. That is an
important lesson for engineering educators because we educate and train
the men and women who drive technological change. We turn them
loose to affect, and work within, the developing social, economic, and
political context.
Although Phase I of the Engineer of 2020 (creating the vision) has
already been completed, I hope you will forgive me for making some
observations about the context within which we must advance engi-
neering education. These observations fall into five categories: (1) op-
portunities and challenges; (2) globalization; (3) scale and complexity;
(4) new systems engineering; and (5) delivery and pedagogy.

OPPORTUNITY AND CHALLENGE
I envy the next generation of engineering students because this is
the most exciting period in human history for science and engineering.
Explosive advances in knowledge, instrumentation, communication,
and computational capabilities have created mind-boggling possibilities
for the next generation. The degree to which students are already rou-
tinely cutting across traditional disciplinary boundaries is unprec-
edented. Indeed, the distinction between science and engineering in
some domains has been blurred to extinction, which raises some serious
issues for engineering education.
As we think about the many challenges ahead, it is important to
remember that students are driven by passion, curiosity, engagement,
and dreams. Although we cannot know exactly what they should be

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