2003 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Highlights

"Staying In Tune With Engineering Education"
June 22-25, 2003
Nashville, Tennessee

Main Plenary

Monday, June 23, 2003
Renaissance Hotel, Grand Ballroom
8:30 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.

The Honorable Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson is the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Jackson holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from M.I.T and a S.B. in physics from M.I.T. Her career prior to becoming Rensselaer's president has encompassed senior positions in government, as Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; in industry and research, as a theoretical physicist at the former AT&T Bell Laboratories and in academe, and as a professor of theoretical physics at Rutgers University. While at Rutgers University, Dr. Jackson taught undergraduate and graduate students, conducted research on the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional systems, and supervised Ph.D. candidates.

Dr. Jackson conducted research in theoretical physics, solid state and quantum physics, and optical physics at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Her primary research focus was: the optical and electronic properties of layered materials including transition metal dichalcogenides, electrons on the surface of liquid helium films, and strained-layer semiconductors.

Dr. Jackson is the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate from M.I.T. -- in any subject. She is one of the first two African-American women to receive a doctorate in physics in the U.S. She is the first African-American to become a Commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She is both the first woman and the first African-American to serve as the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and now the first African-American woman to lead a national research university. She is also the first African-American woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Jackson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998 for her significant and profound contributions as a distinguished scientist and advocate for education, science, and public policy. Dr. Jackson was inducted into the Women in Technology International Foundation Hall of Fame (WITI) in June 2000. WITI recognizes women technologists and scientists whose achievements are exceptional.

Changes and Challenges in Engineering Education

Presented by
Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D.
President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

American Society for Engineering Education
Main Plenary
Nashville, Tennessee
Monday, June 23, 2003 

Thank you, John (John A. Scalice) for that kind introduction, and good morning.

It is a great pleasure to be a part of this esteemed and distinguished assembly, where the critical work of engineering education is being discussed in light of the changes and challenges of the new century.

I am honored to be with you here in Tennessee, where engineers and scientists worked diligently to harness nuclear energy for domestic uses, and for our national defense. As the former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), I understand the degree to which engineers and scientists recognized the promise of nuclear power, brought it to fruition, and continue to seek new ways to apply it to the common purposes of life. In fact, as NRC Chairman, I licensed the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant, which is part of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and allowed the restart of the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, which had been shut down for a decade.

I would like to begin this morning by thanking you — thanking each of you — for all that you do. As engineering education leaders, including deans, professors, instructors, government and industry representatives, and students, you form the very foundation upon which the future of engineering is built. And, that future is essential — because it creates and augments the very capacity of our nation for innovation, for discovery, and for technological advancement. Our prosperity, our health, our quality of life, our leadership in the world, and our national security depend upon what you are building daily.

Now, one cannot talk about engineering education without talking, first, about engineering. And, before we can plot changes for the future, we need to know where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going. In speaking of engineering, one essentially must speak of change.

After this brief examination, I will explore the implications for engineering education. I also will tell you a little about what Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is doing. Finally, I will examine a most fundamental question — that is, who will be tomorrow’s engineers?

But, let me reach back into history, a little, setting the stage for the future. Fifty years ago, technological change was beginning to focus on peaceful uses for what had been wartime technologies in such areas as atomic energy, air transportation, agriculture, jet and rocket propulsion, and early space travel. Engineers and scientists made new discoveries leading to advancements in entertainment communications, especially television, as well as early electronic computers, semiconductors, the microchip, and, eventually, laser optics, fiber optics, and holograms — developments that have revolutionized life today.

The technological developments of the middle 20th century advanced and enhanced the quality of human life at unprecedented rates, created a thriving national economy, and turned the United States into the undisputed technological world leader. Each new technological breakthrough was a triumph, critically important in and of itself, and the new knowledge informed yet newer discoveries and applications.

The basic science research and engineering innovation, and the accumulated knowledge base, which informed 20th century breakthroughs, primarily were “stand-alones” — developed within discrete disciplines and often applied independently — at least, at first.

That was yesterday. Not today.

In today’s environment, innovation and technological breakthroughs more likely are driven by convergence — where disciplines intersect. The sciences and engineering are becoming less separate and distinct from each other. They are blurring, as once singular fields now collaborate, with sometimes surprising, and always interesting, results.

This new multidisciplinarity is responsible for cutting-edge endeavors such as nanotechnology and biotechnology. Nanotechnology, as I am sure you are aware, marries traditional materials science and engineering with the ability to manipulate molecules and atoms, and quantum science. Nanotechnology applications are giving us devices that can be implanted in our bodies for diagnosis and therapy, new materials — metals, ceramics, polymers, semiconductors, and composites, even new biological materials — enhanced with novel properties. These already are impacting every industry, including computers, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, defense, health care, communications — the list goes on and on. As this new endeavor reaches its full potential, it is postulated that nanotechnology may give us the ability to “reverse engineer” the human brain to reveal its “software design.”

The emergence of nanotechnology is strong and pervasive. It is predicted that both electronic and mechanical technologies are shrinking at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade, which would turn much technology into nanotechnology by 2020.

In another and, sometimes, related area, biotechnology merges the principles, laws, and techniques of engineering, physics, chemistry, and other physical sciences with biology, other life sciences, and medicine. The resultant multifaceted approach helps to define and to resolve problems in biomedical research and in clinical medicine for improved health care.

For instance, teams of engineers, cell biologists, histologists, and surgeons are creating new tissue — bone, for example — which has been impaired or has lost function. Tissue repair scaffolds, some created from native extracellular matrix (ECM), can be used to replace or repair damaged tissue. In what is known as regenerative medicine, researchers and clinicians are using and coaxing stem cells to form functional tissue, such as beating heart muscle.

An imaging device, recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is an example from biomedical engineering. This swallowable pill endoscope contains a miniature telecamera which acquires images as it travels through the gastrointestinal tract.

To function effectively in this interdisciplinary environment, more and more is asked of today’s engineers. A biomedical engineer, for instance, may need to be familiar with anatomy, physiology, histology, and other aspects of medicine. He or she must understand mathematical and computational sciences, and possess a working knowledge of biology, behavioral science and health, as well as basic engineering principles. Biomedical engineering operates across the spectrum from the molecular to the organ systems level, using innovative materials, processes, implants, devices, and informatics in disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and in rehabilitation, and overall health improvement.

The technological and scientific complexity of today’s multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity necessarily entails increasing levels of collaboration and teamwork where the need to understand, explain, persuade and emphasize pertain. The engineers of today are spending more time explaining complex technologies to consumers and customers, to lawyers and legislators, to policy makers and the media. There is an increasing need to forecast and evaluate the social contexts, ethical implications, and environmental consequences of their work.

All of this makes a compelling case that engineers be educated more broadly and deeply to give them the requisite skills and experience for communication, collaboration, and creativity, as they function in a wider arena than they have traditionally.

Which brings me to the fundamental question — what does the present and projected future for engineering portend for engineering education? What are the pedagogical challenges those of us in higher education would be wise to consider now, to assure that students graduating from our programs are prepared to be useful in, succeed at, and lead, in the new engineering environment? What will they need to know?

Liberal Arts Education

The recognition of the importance of a broader scope for educating engineers dates to the Morrill Act of 1862, which established the land-grant colleges. Since that time, there has been continuing concern that engineering education does not sufficiently incorporate liberal studies. Reports over the years, and their recommendations for incorporating more of the liberal arts, echo each other: The report of Dr. Charles Mann, University of Chicago (1918); The Wickenden Studies (1930); The Jackson Report (1939); The Grintner Report (1955); The Olmsted report (1968), to name several.

A few schools have acted on the idea — Dartmouth has the Thayer School, established on this premise, within a liberal arts college, with attendant liberal arts requirements. Smith College recently established its Picker Engineering Program, with a somewhat similar outlook, but focused on creating women engineers.

During the Middle Ages, the term “liberal arts” referred to the freedom conferred upon one by scholarship and the acquisition of knowledge. The Latin word “liber” means “free,” and the term denoted the freedom to work with one’s mind rather than with one’s hands — the freedom from manual labor. The original seven liberal — or liberating — arts were organized into two sets — the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The first set comprised grammar, logic, and rhetoric — or what we would think of as mastery of thought processes through communication, organization, and persuasion. The Quadrivium consisted of the basic sciences of the day — arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy; and music.

Obviously, we have come some distance from the original concept, but it is interesting to see that, originally, the liberal arts combined the sciences with the fine arts, and with a broad spectrum of communication and analytical skills. It is a concept worth revisiting in the context of engineering education today.

Leadership Education

Education for the current environment necessitates interactive leadership education to complement, and supplement, traditional engineering preparation.

Leadership skills promote and support practices which foster teamwork and integrity in professional and personal development, and aid in the understanding and the utilization of vision, culture, and values in the corporate and public worlds. Leadership education — perhaps counter-intuitively — strengthens teams and teamwork skills, provides models and methods for problem-solving, and enables students to test personal limits, and to explore cultural assumptions. Leadership education promotes collaboration, effective communication and feedback, conflict management, team development, and ethical decision-making. Through experiential learning, students are exposed to specific leadership theories, and they learn motivation techniques, and tools to succeed in a diverse organizational culture. In short, leadership education and the professional development which it entails, give students a head start for functioning in the corporate and the larger world.

A key phrase, here, is “diverse organizational culture.” As the corporate world responds to increasing globalization, students, today, will navigate a career in which their colleagues and peers, and their customers, are from diverse cultures and environments, and, literally, may be a world away. As corporations cast their nets wider and farther for partners, collaborators, and clients — oftentimes across continents and oceans — tomorrow’s engineers will need the skills to navigate successfully this new environment.

Ethics Education

The Engineering Criteria 2000 of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has, rightly, required that ethics be incorporated into engineering education. How could this be otherwise, in a post-genomic world, for instance, or in one in which corporations are attempting to embrace ethical practice as a corporate value? The global environment in which corporations, governments, and, indeed, institutions of higher education function has brought closer to hand key questions of the day, including sustainable development, privacy, security, resource distribution, and, of course, human trials in biomedical research.

An interesting example occurred recently when physicians at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, transplanted stem cells from his bone marrow into the heart of a teen-aged boy, to help him regenerate heart muscle after he had suffered a heart attack and heart muscle damage from having been shot accidentally, with a nail gun. He is much improved. When this was revealed, the FDA forbade further transplantation before more nonhuman studies are done. The ability to do this procedure at all resulted from breakthroughs in tissue engineering, which brings physicians, biomedical scientists, and engineers together in joint creativity and innovation.

I believe this example personifies, all the more, why science and engineering practice will be impacted by the convergent forces of inter- and multidisciplinarity, interactivity and ethics. While some indifference to issues illustrated by my example may affect a single discipline, it is more difficult to sustain when people from several fields are working together in a conjoint endeavor. Furthermore, a coalescence of varying perspectives often helps to highlight, and to clarify, issues and potential ethical questions — questions which might escape notice, or mention, among same-discipline colleagues.

I contend that this kind of cross-fertilization is healthy and useful, and it will both inform, and enhance, the responsiveness of the engineering profession to the ethical implications of innovation and the application of discoveries. I also expect that ethics content and concepts will be sought after by students themselves, as they are included in undergraduate research and design teams, and learn, through experiential education, what awaits them in real-world situations. A study at Lamar University found that understanding of professional and ethical responsibility was higher among practitioners than graduate students, and higher among graduate students than undergraduates. As students become more involved in undergraduate research, and in team-based design and practice, I expect their interest in ethics and social issues will increase.

Entrepreneurship Education

Yet another element that increasingly will be important in engineering education is teaching students how to move discoveries and innovations from the research or design lab into the marketplace.

Rapid technological change and the emerging global marketplace are increasing opportunities, and the need, for scientific and technological entrepreneurship. In the corporations of today and tomorrow, where traditional “silo walls” are coming down between departments, teams are shepherding ideas through creation, design, and prototyping into useful and beneficial formats to be made available through the marketplace. Understanding how to recognize and assess market opportunities, and to execute successful business plans will give tomorrow’s engineers the tools they will need to function as valuable team members and leaders in the new environment.

All of this is occurring against a backdrop where yet more depth across a broader array of fields (including biology) is required of today’s engineers.

I can almost hear my higher education colleagues in the audience gasping — or, perhaps, groaning — at the recitation of the new knowledge needed to succeed as engineers in today’s world, and in the future. And, I am sure that this is not the first time you have encountered these thoughts. In four-year engineering degree curricula — already filled nearly to capacity — how are we to engage undergraduates in still more? Can a four-year undergraduate engineering curriculum, indeed, hold more?

I would posit that the time has come for us to consider more fully, and to discuss, the wisdom of making the first professional degree a graduate degree. If engineers are being asked to know more, to offer more skills, and to provide more value when they enter the workplace, is it not our responsibility to see that students are prepared and educated appropriately? Should the first professional degree be at the Master’s level? Given the pace of technological change, should there be more doctoral level education offered, and encouraged, with the concomitant research focus?

Certainly, the four-year baccalaureate degree must be focused on insuring that students have a grounding in the basics of their disciplines, in ethics, in interactive, team-based problem-solving, and an introduction to the new basics in other fields required of today’s engineers. Graduate education is necessary to give students more advanced knowledge, and to afford them the opportunity to work on really hard, open-ended problems, and to be able to define problems themselves through research-based engineering.

I believe that it is important to raise these issues in education fora such as this one, so that they may have a thorough airing, and the benefit of debate and discussion among engineering education professionals.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

To that end, let me next give you a brief glimpse into the approach that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has taken with regard to some of these educational issues.

As you know, Rensselaer has been on the cutting edge of engineering education since its inception in 1824, when it proposed to educate men and women "in the application of science to the common purposes of life." With 2,600 undergraduate engineering students, and more than 750 graduate students, we have developed a robust, modern curriculum based on hands-on engineering and strong design experiences. We have faculty who integrate teaching and research using modern teaching methods in state-of-the-art classrooms and laboratories.

Rensselaer was among the first to use computers in the classroom for design exercises, for teaching mathematical concepts, for solving problems that confront working scientists and engineers, for mathematical modeling, and for the interpretation of results. Rensselaer initiated studio classrooms, a ubiquitous computing environment, and interactive, interdisciplinary design projects which have teams of students developing solutions to real-world needs. One team, for instance, developed a device that enables people with tremor disorders to feed themselves. The process of invention — from concept to reality — has become an integral part of the Rensselaer education experience. The teams bring together students in engineering, computer science, management, the visual arts and acoustics. These new teams make use of specialized skills that all students must acquire.

Learning at Rensselaer is continuous, interactive, and interpersonal — between and among students, faculty, and a vast array of information sources. As we say: learning is 24-7. As such, we believe strongly in a resident undergraduate experience because of the opportunity it provides for face-to-face experiential learning, and for the development of the lifelong relationships students form with each other and with faculty members, both as teachers and as fellow researchers, which are critical to their professional success. It is a fundamental that has no virtual substitute.

An example of such 24-7 student-centered learning is the multi-disciplinary design laboratory experience.

In the MDL, teams of five to ten students from different academic programs work on interdisciplinary industry projects, typically product or system design, development and optimization. Industry sponsors (for example, General Electric [GE] and United Technologies Corporation [UTC]) support projects and assure the direct involvement of company engineers. This greatly benefits our students, and is key to the potential for project success.

In the second generation MDL, begun last academic year, there is participation of Lally School of Management and Technology students on projects to consider cost and commercialization, and the possible transition of projects to incubator companies. In team development of Rensselaer Intellectual property, a patent was issued for a device that tracks movement of the eye-pupil.

We continue to strengthen our curricula and to raise the bar for student achievement. In the past year, for instance, we have developed and adopted a series of core curriculum outcomes.

• One is a fundamental understanding of both the physical and biological worlds, and to that end we have initiated a new freshmen biological sciences requirement.
  
  
• Another is a basic understanding of how organizations turn ideas, services, and technology into value — hence we have incorporated entrepreneurship education across the curriculum. For our engineering students — and for our management degree — we require leadership education.
  
  
• In addition, in order to graduate, all students will complete a culminating experience such as a research-based thesis, a major design project, or a major case-study.

We are selective in choosing students, but once they come to campus, we work to keep them. While excellence is our watchword, we do not believe that excellence and nurturing are incompatible. We are careful to mentor and to provide academic guidance to students, so that evidence of difficulty is caught in time to be resolved successfully. In sum, we have created a dynamic, interactive, team-based residential learning environment to nurture and prepare students for the dynamic, interactive, team environments that they will find in today’s workplace.

Why residential? Why not distance education? It is a subject that could be a whole discussion, in and of itself. However, I will tell you what we have chosen to do at Rensselaer in light of the unique Rensselaer approach. We have chosen to use distance education in a very focused way. We will not offer a smorgasbord of selections. And, because we believe strongly in a residential experience for undergraduates — and in undergraduate research — we have chosen not to use distance education, in the classic sense, in our undergraduate program.

Instead, we believe distance delivered, distributed education within our graduate Education for Working Professionals (EWP) core enterprise can help to provide the access needed by working professionals who seek advanced training. This program is centered at our Hartford, Connecticut, campus, where we continue to offer certificate programs and advanced degrees, some of them via distributed delivery mechanisms.

I do not mean to suggest this approach for everyone. But, it is right for Rensselaer, at this time.

Workforce

My final theme is the pressing question of who will do the engineering of tomorrow? With engineering enrollments static or declining, and with retirements rising, the profession — and, I suggest, the nation — is in a classic bind.

Together, engineers and scientists comprise less than 5 percent of the total U.S. civilian workforce, and yet, their impact on society, the economy, and our national “quality of life” greatly exceeds their small number, as it has throughout U.S. history. I am not sure the national consciousness is sufficiently aware that engineers have given the United States the tools to acquire, and the means to achieve, the world’s strongest national economy, with the largest per-capita income and the highest standard of living — a standard to which much of the world aspires. The abundance and sophistication of infrastructure — communications, transportation, and computing — derived from their work, likewise, have enabled the United States, generously, to provide unparalleled assistance to much of the world, alleviating many afflictions and disasters, and leading a global marketplace of goods, technologies, and information.

Nor is the national consciousness sufficiently aware of the essential contribution the engineering profession makes to our national security, especially in the evolving context of an uncertain world.

Engineering enrollments, essentially, are flat. Although engineering enrollments picked up for the third consecutive year, increasing by 3.4 percent to 67,301 in 2001-2002 academic year at the bachelor’s degree level, the number is still below the 1988 high of 70,000 — 15 years ago. These statistics are taken from the ASEE Profiles in Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges, 2002 edition. And, in graduate education, although the latest statistics show that enrollments are up by more than 14 percent from the prior year, the number of master’s degrees awarded increased only 1.4 percent and awarded doctoral degrees actually decreased by 4.7 percent.

Combine these enrollments with baby-boom retirements, and we have a situation for concern. I expect you know, for instance, that about 15 percent of NASA's science and engineering staff can retire now, and another 25 percent will be eligible for retirement within this decade. Most federal agencies face a similar challenge, as does the corporate and industrial sector. The National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2002 finds that although the number of degreed scientists and engineers in the national labor force will continue to increase for some time, the average age will rise, and retirements will increase dramatically over the next 20 years.

With enrollments down and retirements up, what will our future look like. Who will do engineering? This is not a matter of specific job availability in specific fields, and matching people to them, but is a matter of national capacity and national competitiveness. Other nations are investing in developing scientific and engineering talent. But our young people are turned off to these fields. What can we do?

A key part of the answer lies in what I call the “new majority” — the underrepresented majority — young women, members of underrepresented minority groups, and young people with disabilities. Together, they form the new majority in the K-12 education sectors. This is where our future talent resides, and yet we know that far too few of them are choosing, or are prepared to choose, study in engineering. Women, for example, received almost 21 percent of the engineering bachelor degrees awarded in 2002, while African Americans and Hispanics, together, accounted for not quite 11 percent of the engineering bachelor degrees awarded. And yet, these groups are the demographic majority.

Our task, as educators, must be to seek ways to partner with K-12 educational institutions to engage this new talent, and to help students prepare for entrance into our universities. This is a special challenge because, traditionally, our work has begun when these students arrive in our classrooms. I suggest, however, that if we are to turn around these trends, and protect not only engineering enrollments, but also our resultant national economic and security interests, we need to become involved earlier.

We must engage these non-traditional students. We must engage them by nurturing their interest, sparking their imaginations, mentoring them throughout their K-12 experience, and finding and showcasing role models for them to follow.

We must be prepared to intervene earlier, and to supplement what the primary and secondary schools offer these young people, or to seek out other ways to assure that they are prepared, academically, to undertake engineering study. U.S. high school students rank near the bottom internationally in science and mathematics. If this is true for the population as a whole, how do girls and minority groups escape this quicksand?

And, if we are successful in sparking interest and infusing adequate preparation, will these new young talented people have the means to study engineering? Fewer than 40 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the lowest family income quartile go to college, compared with about 80 percent of the top quartile income families. What can we do about this?

These are important questions, because if these young people are willing, prepared, and financially able to study engineering — and we are able to keep them engaged through matriculation, and graduation, then we will have bridged the engineering talent gap. If underrepresented minority groups, women, and persons with disabilities were adequately represented in science and engineering, there would be no U.S. talent gap.

Our challenge is to make this happen in engineering and across the full spectrum of scientific discipline and endeavor. I believe — absolutely — that we can mine the intellectual talent latent in America’s new majority, but to do so we must engage the force of national will and develop a national strategy. I believe there is growing recognition of this crucial need — and we all must encourage this recognition. Our national future depends upon how we face this challenge, perhaps more than we know.

Conclusion

I believe the implications for engineering education are clear, although perhaps not easy. There is much to do. The graduates of the future will need wider vision, broader reference points, deeper — and lifelong — learning. They will need to be nimble enough to shift gears quickly and to go in new directions. They will need to lead their teams, their companies, their research into new territory. We must take these as our marching orders, and we must look critically at our programs to assure ourselves and our students that they will be prepared to step through the window of today into the world of tomorrow.

Thank you.

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