Page 31 - 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

14 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

change is reaching a critical mass and that coordinated action on a broad
scale may be possible and effective.
Efforts to realign engineering education, of varying scopes, have
taken place in almost every decade of the twentieth century, beginning
in the early 1900s. (See the brief history provided by Bruce Seely in
Appendix A.) As a student of this history, Seely suggests points of conti-
nuity between this initiative and efforts in past eras, including:

• an explicit desire to increase the public recognition of the role
of engineering professionals, to enhance the social status and
prestige of the community by depicting a compelling vision of
engineering;
• a clear recognition of the need to attract and sustain the interest
of students from the groups continually and currently
underrepresented in the study and practice of engineering;
• the complex relationship between academic engineering, the
corporations and large industrial concerns that employ the great
majority of engineering graduates, and the nation’s economy;
• a continuous and sometimes contentious debate about the role
of liberal studies (humanistic and social science courses) in pre-
paring the professional engineer;
• a persistent struggle to arrive at balance in the several curricular
elements in the undergraduate engineering program—the sci-
entific base, the technical core, professional and general educa-
tion; and
• lurking concerns about institutional inertia, whether in the
form of faculty resistance to change or the challenges of mov-
ing the “battleship” of the modern research university.

He also suggests that present efforts are characterized by some posi-
tive points of departure with past efforts, particularly:

• a motivation to think ahead as a community, to step beyond
the immediacy of the moment and the challenges of the present
to imagine the future;
• the active engagement of experts from the field of management
in the first phase of the Engineer of 2020 Project, informing
the process of gathering facts, of forecasting future conditions,

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