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Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
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RECOMMENDATIONS 57

so choose. There are many local efforts in progress to help secondary
school students understand the nature of engineering and some, such as
Project Lead the Way and the Infinity Project, which are active in mul-
tiple states. Efforts to share successful practices from these programs
and propagate them even further are essential. Thus, we recommend
that

12. Engineering schools should lend their energies to a national
effort to improve math, science, and engineering education at the
K-12 level.

It is in the enlightened self-interest of engineering schools to help
the public understand what engineers do and the role that engineering
plays in ensuring their quality of life. Moreover, a country weak in
technological literacy will have increasing difficulty competing in the
technology-driven global economy of the twenty-first century. Thus, we
recommend that

13. The engineering education establishment should participate in
a coordinated national effort to promote public understanding of
engineering and technology literacy of the public.

As indicated in a paper by Busch-Vishniac and Jarosz, provided to
the Summit participants, there appears to be an unlimited number of
different engineering curricula structures and the attendant engineering
education schemes they imply offered by the multitude of engineering
programs across the country (2004). While engineering faculty, as ex-
perts in the domain, might understand and appreciate the different pos-
sible approaches, it is highly unlikely that a high school junior or senior,
his or her guidance counselor, or parents could understand the alterna-
tives and deduce which scheme and which school might be most suit-
able for enrollment. In the spirit that the engineering community must
“sell” the value and excitement of an engineering education, the com-
munity must make every effort to help interested students make an
informed choice. The American Society of Engineering Education
(ASEE) has an excellent website (http://www.asee.org/about/publications/
profiles/index.cfm#Online_Profiles) containing statistical profiles of un-
dergraduate engineering programs, but we believe that it would also be
informative to collect information from the point of view of the

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