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05.09

Licensure of Engineering Faculty — A Difficult Proposition?

By David L. Whitman, PH.D., P.E., NCEES President-Elect

Section 110.20 of the Model Law defines the practice of engineering. That definition includes the “teaching of advanced engineering subjects.” To me, that’s a clear message that professional licensure should be required for engineering faculty members. And yet, at most institutions the number of faculty members who hold a P.E. license is relatively small. As a professor myself, this has always bothered me. In my opinion, we—the faculty—should hold ourselves as examples for students who will be working in an engineering field in the future and may need licensure. In fact, a past NCEES study showed that faculty members strongly influenced a student’s decision to take the FE exam and thus start on the path to licensure.

Licensure is uncommon among professors

In an attempt to get some additional insight, I polled my colleagues at the University of Wyoming (UW) about licensure. There are 65 faculty members in the College of Engineering and Applied Science who teach engineering topics. Of these, 38 (58.5 percent) replied to my e-mail request for information. Of the 38 who responded, 18 (47.4 percent) are licensed as a P.E. While this seems like a high percentage (at least relative to the overall national licensure rate of about 20 percent of all engineers), I suspect that those who are licensed were more likely to respond to my query. I recall a study at UW a few years ago that determined that approximately one-third of our faculty was licensed. Of the 20 who indicated they did not have a P.E., 8 indicated at least some intention to pursue licensure in the future.

What I found extremely interesting was that nearly 100 percent of the licensed faculty indicated that they pursued licensure for the purpose of consulting rather than teaching. A few had their licenses prior to becoming faculty members, but even those who pursued licensure while a faculty member indicated consulting as the primary motive. The university system appears to be doing very little to encourage faculty to become licensed for the sake of following the Model Law in terms of teaching. Only a handful of faculty thought that licensure should become a requirement for tenure and promotion in the university system. However, a few expressed that if incentives (primarily salary) were high enough, they might be encouraged to pursue licensure.

Member Board efforts to encourage faculty licensure

I also asked NCEES Member Board administrators to respond to a couple of quick questions related to this subject. I heard from 27 jurisdictions. All of these jurisdictions indicated that, while they do have language in their statutes that is similar to the Model Law, none have laws that force a connection between licensure and the university tenure and promotion process. In addition, with the exception of Delaware, none of these jurisdictions appeared to know of any incentive programs for faculty to become licensed. Several years ago, the dean at the University of Delaware offered faculty a $5,000 research incentive to become licensed, but the Delaware PE Board received no applications based on that incentive. Several jurisdictions reported methods of encouraging licensure that often included having representatives from academia on their boards. The Maine PE Board hosts a table during EWeek on college campuses in that state with giveaways and information about licensure.

Since 1988, Idaho’s statutes have included the requirement that faculty who teach upper-division engineering design subjects must be licensed. Its statutes provide a three-year window from the date of hire to the date of obtaining licensure. Each year, the deans provide the Idaho Board a list of upper-division courses that contain significant design content and the names of the professors who teach them. This appears to be working well for all parties involved. In Kentucky, Montana, and other jurisdictions, the rules and/or regulations point toward the teaching of engineering design courses rather than the more generic upper-division courses. Perhaps this is a more viable requirement to try to enforce.

In Wyoming, the statutes define the teaching of engineering topics as the practice of engineering. The board’s approach has been to require that the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Wyoming be a licensed P.E. Effectively, this places the remainder of the faculty under a form of industrial exemption. I know that all of the UW deans since 1975 have either had a P.E. license upon their employment or completed the licensure process within a couple of years. In my estimation, this might be a form of compromise for those jurisdictions who feel powerless to enforce their statutes that deal with university teaching or for those who are considering removing the teaching of engineering topics from their current statutes.

As an additional thought that might encourage some faculty to pursue licensure, I would direct you to Model Rules 230.40 (5). This section allows for a waiver of the FE examination requirement for applicants holding a doctorate in engineering. As with other practitioners who have been “away from the basics” for a long time, the FE exam is often a more daunting hurdle to faculty than the PE exam. For jurisdictions that already have this provision in your rules: advertise it. For those who don’t: consider adopting it. It might cause a few faculty members to reconsider their decision not to pursue licensure.

Final thoughts

The licensure of faculty has been—and will most likely continue to be—a difficult proposition. Requiring licensure to be a necessary element of the university system of tenure and promotion would probably be impossible to get through state legislatures, but passing and enforcing rules and/or regulations that more closely focus the definition of the practice of engineering to the teaching of upper-division engineering design courses might be palatable for all parties involved. I could easily see that having 100 percent of an institution’s design courses taught by licensed P.E.’s would be an excellent student recruiting tool. Whatever we can do through the Member Boards to encourage more faculty to become licensed will be a step in the right direction.

This article has been reprinted with permission from the December 2008 issue of the NCEES Licensure Exchange.

David L. Whitman, Ph.D., P.E., is a member of IEEE-USA's Licensure and Registration Committee, and President-Elect of the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES). Comments on this article may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.

Opinions expressed are the author's.