Page 45 - 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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28 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

TABLE 3-1 Student Perceptions of Professional Careers
Careers “worth the extra
High Opinion, % effort,” %
High School College High School College
Professions Students Students Students Students

Doctors 78 85 90 92
Lawyers 45 38 71 77
Teachers 66 83 70 81
Engineers 58 72 68 35
Accountants/CPA 30 36 40 47
SOURCE: Taylor Research & Consulting Group (2000).

better understanding of the nature of engineering than high school stu-
dents, have a higher opinion of engineers than high school students
have, but are much less likely to believe an engineering career is worth
the extra effort.
It is also important for the engineering community to better com-
municate, in an increasingly technological society, the value of engi-
neering training for a variety of tasks/challenges not typically consid-
ered within the boundaries of “traditional” engineering. NSF (1998)
data show that there are 2.2 million people with degrees in engineering,
and of those, 1.0 million indicate that their principal occupation is not
engineering. The value of a broad engineering education, to include, for
example, business and communications expertise, for those who aspire
to management can be deduced from the NSF data in Figure 3-2, which
show that, “among master’s-level engineering graduates in the private
for-profit sector (where most engineering graduates work), those who
have combined their engineering degree(s) with a degree outside science
or engineering are more likely to become senior managers (someone
responsible for leading others in management) at some point in their
career” (NSF, 1998).
Similarly, it is important to help the public understand the breadth
of engineering as well as its depth. Many consider engineering to in-
volve, among other things, the application of scientific principles to the
solution of human challenges. For a long time the scientific principles
of interest were those of the physical sciences. Recent advances in the

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