> home
> About
> Contact Us
> Editorial Info
> IEEE-USA

07.09

Expanding the Scope of Engineering Education in The Humanities?

By Dr. James Gover, IEEE Fellow

Concerns About Engineering Education

Over my 46 years of engineering practice, public policy and engineering education careers, on numerous occasions there have been calls to (1) expand the scope of engineering education to include more courses in the humanities, (2) redefine the Bachelor of Science (BS) in engineering to be a broad, highly interdisciplinary degree that introduces students to the fundamentals of all engineering disciplines (the BS degree would then be followed by a Master of Science (MS) degree in any field of engineering), (3) increase the credit hours required for a BS in engineering, (4) improve the communications skills of engineers, and (5) place more emphasis on design. In the following, I address the pros and cons of requiring engineering students to take more coursework in the humanities.

In response to concerns about engineering education, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has required engineering schools to demonstrate that their students have the following competencies: understand how engineering impacts society, be familiar with contemporary issues, be well grounded in ethics, be skilled in oral and written communication and be experienced with working in teams. ABET also requires engineering students to have a design experience.

Another concern expressed about engineering education is that its lack of emphasis on the humanities inhibits the advancement of engineers into Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman of Board (COB) positions. In fact, engineers who aspire to become CEOs or COBs can continue their education in law, business, finance, economics, etc., at the Masters level and overcome any educational deficiencies in the humanities resident in their undergraduate education. Engineers aspiring to high level corporate management positions should and do pursue non-engineering education routes after the BS in engineering.

Anecdotal Evidence of a Problem

There is an abundance of anecdotal evidence that can be used to argue engineers are well prepared to address the technical dimensions of problem solving, but are not well prepared to address the public policy, legal, business, social, political and economic dimensions of problems. Obviously, effective problem solving requires all dimensions of problems to be addressed.

For example, the Department of Energy (DOE) Laboratories built the spent nuclear fuel rod storage facility in Yucca Mountain and did the work in an indisputably outstanding technical way that assures the safety of residents of Nevada. Overlooked was the fact that the residents of Nevada did not want a nuclear waste storage facility. If early on the political, legal, sustainability and social dimensions of this problem had been addressed, perhaps we would now either: (1) be storing spent fuel rods in Yucca Mountain, (2) have saved $12B by not building a storage facility that is unlikely to be used or (3) be reprocessing spent fuel rods to extract the uranium and plutonium and be building breeder reactors to extend the life of nuclear fuel reserves.

Another example of engineers addressing well the technical dimensions of problem solving and ignoring the economic and business dimensions was the federal program in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. This program produced some very impressive technical results but because no U.S. lithography firm has the financial resources to commercialize EUV lithography, firms in Europe and Asia are commercializing this technology and the United States will not gain jobs in the semiconductor manufacturing equipment sector from having invented EUV lithography and demonstrating its potential.

The Program for Next Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) is an example of a federal program funding General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to develop an 80 mpg vehicle only to have the Japanese firms, Honda and Toyota, become the first to introduce hybrid vehicles built in Japan into the US market. Again, the U.S. program emphasized technology when the principal issue was business and attracting Toyota and Honda to build their hybrids and hybrid components in the United States to create jobs for U.S. citizens.

Advocating research and development of fuel cell vehicles when plug-in hybrids had more promise for helping both the transportation and electric energy generation sectors is another mistake jointly made by some U.S. auto firms and the U.S. government. Seemingly forgotten was that fuel cells were excessively expensive and no infrastructure existed for making and distributing the hydrogen for fueling the cells. Furthermore, depending on the energy source used to make the hydrogen, fuel cells for vehicles could aggravate rather than aid the global warming problem. This is another case of technology options not being carefully weighed against risk, business and economics issues. There are also numerous social issues, e.g., public safety, that could also serve to inhibit the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles.

Another recent example of flawed decision making is the emphasis placed on extracting ethanol from corn that has been emphasized by many state governments. Even though technical and economic analyses show corn-based ethanol to be technically and economically undesirable, the political benefits accrued from helping farmers reap profits from growing corn have dominated other considerations.

Although slowly reducing its criticisms of nuclear power, the U.S. environmental community’s anti-nuclear posture caused a long delay in giving nuclear power serious consideration as a means of reducing global warming gases. This is an example of the non-technical community making decisions that were economically and technically flawed. France, generally thought to be more environmentally conscious than the United States, has not made this mistake and currently generates almost 80 percent of its electrical energy from nuclear power plants.

The common thread among all of these examples is that those in charge of problem solving either were (1) in circumstances dominated by political considerations that inhibited holistic, systems level problem solving or (2) were incapable of holistic problem solving.

Contradicting the Evidence

Even though more education is always desirable, it is unlikely that the poor decisions described in the previous section would have been any different if the engineers involved in these projects had 18 additional credit hours in the humanities.

First, all federal programs, with the exception of Congressional earmarks, must be compatible with the interests of the political party in the White House. Generally, new programs are started in agencies in response to political commitments made by the White House to senior executives in various industrial sectors or at the recommendation of highly influential people not affiliated with a company. It is the responsibility of agency officials to respond to the direction of the President and the responsibility of agency contractors to only address the dimensions of the problem they are tasked to address. In fact, there has been a long-standing tension between the DOE and its national laboratories regarding the distribution of power and the independence of the laboratories. How to make federal programs holistic in the way problems are addressed is an enormous matter far broader in scope than engineering education.

Second, in the industry sectors selected for examples, even though the engineers involved in making poor decisions may well have been deficient in the humanities, this inadequacy was irrelevant because these deficiencies were compensated for by the presence of lawyers, financial experts and professionals from other disciplines who were involved in making the wrong choices. In fact, one suspects that lawyers, financial experts, policy makers and politicians would benefit far more from having engineering education than engineers would benefit from additional education in the humanities.

Third, in a democratic society, eventually the will of the people prevails and the public gets the policies it demands and, as some would claim, deserves. Energy policy serves as an example of the public lacking the technical knowledge necessary to make informed decisions. In defense of the public ‘s ignorance, the news media report energy news only after removing all of the technical content and many of those speaking about energy have a vested interest in shaping what the public believes to be true. Even DOE’s laboratories turn out to be advocates for the type of energy they are currently researching. It is because of the lack of public interest and knowledge about energy that the US has found it so difficult to forge an energy policy independent of which political party is in the White House or which political party has the majority in Congress. Consequently, the United States lurches from one “silver bullet” solution to our dependence on foreign oil to another. For example, the Bush administration advocated fuel cells; the Obama administration is pushing plug-in hybrids and making massive reductions in the federal budget for fuel cells. It is likely that the general public would benefit far more from having more engineering knowledge than engineers would benefit from more coursework in the humanities.

Fourth, I believe that corporations have little understanding that an engineering education is designed to ingrain in students the fundamentals of the science and mathematics of engineering, not train engineers in how to use or repair a particular technology. While academics distinguish between education and training, corporations often seem to not understand the difference and use the terms education and training as synonyms. Engineering technology changes rapidly, the science and mathematics of engineering change very slowly. One trains people for well-defined, repetitive tasks requiring minimal original thought; one educates people for ill-defined tasks requiring deep thinking, synthesis and analysis. Instead of universities soliciting recommendations regarding engineering curricula from companies, perhaps corporations would be better served if university business schools trained their management in how to make the most effective use of their engineering workforce and trained them in how to make engineering a much more attractive career option for the best and brightest students.

Realities of Engineering Education

Engineering is one of the few degree programs in which the aim is to make the graduate a professional after completing the BS degree. Some universities such as Kettering University require students to have also completed 8 school terms working for a company in a co-op position much as a physician serves as a resident at a hospital. Engineering education programs are already over-stuffed with courses and many of these courses are required in order to gain accreditation. Most engineering programs offer electives that permit students to gain a few courses in a specialty technical area, yet most electrical engineers graduate with one course in mechanical engineering and most mechanical engineers graduate with one course in electrical engineering.

In the early 1960s following the Sputnik scare, U.S. high school graduates followed the urging of President Kennedy and pursued engineering as a major. During that period, even though electrical engineering, physics and mathematics consistently attracted the best and brightest freshmen, it was expected that well less than 50 percent of the students were capable of completing a B.S. in engineering. Today there are so few students entering engineering programs as freshmen that the emphasis has shifted from culling out the weak to retention of students. Even the accreditation boards for engineering education consider a retention rate of 50 percent to be excessively low. Furthermore, even though the quality of high school graduates has improved, electrical engineering, physics and mathematics are now in competition with finance, biotechnology, premed and business for the best graduates. The bottom line is: (1) there is a quality issue among engineering graduates because engineering attracts a smaller fraction of the best students than it did a few decades ago, (2) there is a numbers issue among engineering graduates because a smaller fraction of entering freshman are interested in a career in engineering than were interested a few decades ago, and (3) the quality issue is compounded because engineering schools are under immense pressure to retain those students who choose to major in engineering.

Conclusions

Even though it is desirable for all college students to be well educated in the humanities, there is no evidence that I could find that suggests expanded degree requirements in the humanities would have avoided any of the cited undesirable decisions by companies or government involving engineers. Perhaps a better option would be for students studying the humanities, law, medicine, economics, political science, social science, etc., to take more courses in engineering. For a variety of reasons, students find engineering a less attractive career option than they did a few decades ago. Any increase in degree requirements to permit expanded study in the humanities would likely further reduce student interest in engineering education.

References

Goldberg, D., The Missing Basics and Other Philosophical Reflections for the Transformations of Engineering Education, submitted to Grasso, P. (editor), The future of engineering education and practice. http://www.slideshare.net/deg511/what-engineers-dont-learn-why-they-dont-learn-it-what-philosophy-might-do-to-help-presentation

Duderstadt, J. (2008), Engineering for a Changing World (Technical Report), Millennium Project, University of MI, Ann Arbor. http://milproj.ummu.umich.edu/publications/EngFlex%20report/download/EngFlex%20Report.pdf

National Academy of Engineering (2005), Educating the engineer of 2020, National Academies Press. http://www.ceat.okstate.edu/reports/educating_the_engineer_of_2020.pdf

National Academy of Engineering (2004), The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the new century, Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.

Dr. James Gover is an IEEE Fellow and a professor of electrical engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich. Comments on this article may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.

Opinions expressed are the author's.