Page 69 - 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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52 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

It is evident that the exploding body of science and engineering
knowledge cannot be accommodated within the context of the tradi-
tional four-year baccalaureate degree. Technical excellence is the essen-
tial attribute of engineering graduates, but those graduates should also
possess team, communication, ethical reasoning, and societal and glo-
bal contextual analysis skills as well as understand work strategies. Ne-
glecting development in these arenas and learning disciplinary technical
subjects to the exclusion of a selection of humanities, economics, politi-
cal science, language, and/or interdisciplinary technical subjects is not
in the best interest of producing engineers able to communicate with
the public, able to engage in a global engineering marketplace, or trained
to be lifelong learners. Thus, we recommend that

1. The baccalaureate degree should be recognized as the “pre-
engineering” degree or bachelor of arts in engineering degree,
depending on the course content and reflecting the career aspira-
tions of the student.

Industry and professional societies should recognize and reward the
distinction between an entry-level engineer and an engineer who mas-
ters an engineering discipline’s “body of knowledge” through further
formal education or self-study followed by examination. The engineer-
ing education establishment must also adopt a broader view of the value
of an engineering education to include providing a “liberal” engineering
education to those students who wish to use it as a springboard for
other career pursuits, such as business, medicine, or law. Adequate depth
in a specialized area of engineering cannot be achieved in the baccalau-
reate degree.
To promote the stature of the profession, engineering schools should
create accredited “professional” master’s degree programs intended to
expand and improve the skills and enhance the ability of an engineer to
practice engineering. Thus, as an addendum to Recommendation 1, we
recommend that

2. ABET should allow accreditation of engineering programs of the
same name at the baccalaureate and graduate levels in the same
department to recognize that education through a “professional”
master’s degree produces an AME, an accredited “master” engineer.

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