Page 179 - 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

162 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

taught, we must think about the environment in which they learn and
the forces, ideas, inspiration, and empowering situations to which they
are exposed. Despite our best efforts to plan their education, to a large
extent we can simply wind them up and then step back and watch the
amazing things they do. In the long run, making universities and engi-
neering schools exciting, creative, adventurous, rigorous, demanding,
and empowering milieus is more important than specifying curricular
details.

GLOBALIZATION
Our task today is to focus on engineering education in the United
States, but we can only do so in the context of engineering in 2020 and
beyond. We have to ask basic questions about future engineers: who
they will be; what they will do; where they will do it; why they will do it;
and what this implies for engineering education in the United States
and elsewhere.
The truth is that in the future American engineers will constitute a
smaller and smaller fraction of the profession. More and more engineers
will be educated and will work in other nations, especially in Asia and
South Asia, and they will do just what our engineers do—work to run
at the leading edge of innovation. Future engineers will be moving rap-
idly up the proverbial food chain. They will practice engineering in
national settings and in global corporations, including corporations with
headquarters in the United States. They will see engineering as an excit-
ing career, a personal upward path, and a way to affect local economic
well-being.
Universities around the world, especially in Asia and South Asia,
are becoming increasingly utilitarian, focusing on advancing economies
and cutting-edge research. Tectonic changes are taking place in the way
engineers are being produced and in where engineering and research
and development are being done.
From the U.S. perspective, globalization is not a choice; it is a real-
ity. To compete in world markets in the “Knowledge Age,” we cannot
depend on geography, natural resources, cheap labor, or military might.
We can only thrive on brainpower, organization, and innovation. Even
agriculture, the one area in which the United States has traditionally
been the low-cost producer, is undergoing a revolution that depends on

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