Page 39 - 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

22 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

9

8 7 Medicine
Law
Years of Formal Education 6 5 4 Engineering
Pharmacy
Architecture
Accounting
Occupational
Therapy

2 3 Engineering
1
0
1900 1920 1950 1980 2000 2010

FIGURE 3-1 Years of formal postsecondary education required to begin practicing in
different fields. SOURCE: Russell et al. (2001).

more than willing to employ unlicensed engineers and train them in the
specific needs of their business, the bachelor’s degree became and re-
mains the overwhelmingly dominant ticket for practicing engineering.
It is unreasonable to expect that corporations will require more than
a four-year engineering degree for entry-level employment, and thus it
is unreasonable to expect that engineering schools will only graduate
five-year (or more) degree students. If, as in the past, some schools move
to a mandatory five-year program, students will flock to those schools
that do not. Similarly, it is unreasonable to expect that professional li-
censure requirements will change in some way to become attractive to
most baccalaureate engineers. Thus, other things being equal, we be-
lieve that engineering schools and professional societies need to look to
other ways that reinvention of engineering education can enhance the
perception of engineering as a profession. A possible alternative is the
master’s degree, in particular, one that can be designed to be accredited
and universally recognized and promoted by both schools and societies
as a “professional” degree, perhaps along the lines of a more technology-
based MBA. That degree will clearly have to provide value in the mar-
ketplace if large numbers of engineers are likely to commit to the time
and expense to acquire it.

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