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Making Connections: The Role of Engineers and Engineering Education

Joseph Bordogna

Tomorrow's engineers will need to use abstract and experiential learning, to work independently and in
teams, and to meld engineering science and engineering practice.

Over 2,000 years ago, a well-to-do citizen of ancient Greece offered some of his real estate, a grove, to a
thoughtful fellow citizen of considerable intellect. The thoughtful citizen desired to make the land a place
where fellow thinkers could gather for hearty discussion on matters of common and uncommon interest.
Thus did Academus yield property to Plato for the purpose of making connections to learn and create. To
make connections to learn in those days, a physical place was needed to develop and share knowledge.
Academus' gracious gift was well received indeed.

Plato's desire to network intelligence was but one example of similar efforts, developing independently over
several centuries in a variety of cultures around the world, that marked the birth of scholarly enterprise. As
time passed, connections to learning proliferated, first slowly, as armies of scriveners valiantly copied tomes
that filled libraries for their patrons, and then more quickly, as technological innovation increasingly became
a facet of wealth creation and daily life. The flow of commerce inexorably meshed with the exchange of
knowledge.

During the past several centuries, the successive development of the printing press, wired and wireless
communication, and the Internet have enabled the ubiquitous creation, shaping, and sharing of knowledge.
One could argue that as a result of these developments, the capacity for universal participation in
decisionmaking in politics and other spheres has risen to an unprecedented level, as has the potential for
enhancing the quality of life for a broader segment of humankind. Today, a new world of robust
communication lies before us, and it has all been made possible by the talents, skills, and dedicated work of
engineers and scientists. How we develop and use this capacity will determine our destiny.

We are entering an age of "distributed intelligence"--an era in which knowledge is available to anyone,
anywhere, at anytime; in which power, information, and responsibility are moving away from centralized
control to the individual. Over the span of just a few years, the size of computers has shrunk dramatically,
from something that would fill a large air-conditioned room to something that fits on our desktop, in our
laps, or in our pockets. The number of Internet hosts leapt from only 200 in 1983 to 10 million in 1996 (a
50,000-fold increase!) and remains on track to continue doubling annually, according to estimates from the
Computing Research Association (Cerf, 1987).

Within this context, engineers and scientists will play an increasingly significant role. Our system of
education and training must therefore equip tomorrow's engineering and science professionals to shoulder
growing responsibilities and pursue emerging opportunities. Recent articles in these pages have addressed
this issue in the context of lifelong learning for engineers (Smerdon, 1996) and the forces of change
affecting engineering education (Vest, 1995). Similarly, the recent report Reshaping the Graduate
Education of Scientists and Engineers, from the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy
(COSEPUP) of the Academies and the Institute of Medicine (1995), examined similar issues as they relate
to graduate education in science and engineering.

This is a healthy discussion, one that this article aims to encourage and hopefully accelerate. By examining
engineering education and exploring innovations based on integrative and holistic approaches, we can shed
light on a host of key issues facing the entire science and engineering enterprise.

As engineers, we can be justly proud of the tremendous role that engineering played in enabling the
Industrial Revolution and the information age. We should look forward now to enabling what is yet to
come.

There is much evidence supporting the notion that technological innovation is central to wealth creation and
economic growth. Many studies (National Science Board, 1996; Smith and Barfield, 1995; U.S. Council of
Economic Advisors, 1995) indicate that, over the past 50 years, technological innovation has accounted for
over one-third of U.S. economic growth.

Peter Drucker (1992) notes that the source of wealth is knowledge creation, a human activity that can yield
both productivity and innovation. Knowledge applied to tasks we already know how to do can boost
productivity, while knowledge applied to tasks that are new and different is innovation, the process of
creating new businesses and delivering new products and services.

The true strength of a nation resides in its human capital--especially its engineering workforce.
Engineers will develop the new processes and products and will create and manage new systems for
civil infrastructure, manufacturing, health care delivery, information management, computer
communications, and so on. In general, they will put knowledge to work for society and facilitate the
private sector's potential to create wealth and jobs.

To be successful and to promote prosperity, engineers must exhibit more than first-rate technical and
scientific skills. In an increasingly competitive world, they must help us make good decisions about
investing enormous amounts of time, money, and human resources toward common ends. I like to think of
the engineer as someone who not only knows how to do things right, but also knows the right thing to do.
This requires that he or she have a broad, holistic background. Since engineering itself is an integrative
process, engineering education must likewise be integrative.

For example, engineers must be able to work in teams and communicate well. They must be flexible,
adaptable, and resilient. Equally important, they must be able to employ a systems approach in their work,
to make connections within the context of ethical, political, international, environmental, and economic
considerations. To better illuminate this last point, I would like to examine the innovation process, as
described by Drucker (i.e., making and profiting from new things, as opposed to productivity, which implies
simply making existing things more efficiently).

A critical element in the innovation process is scientific inquiry, an analytic, reductionist process that
involves delving into the secrets of the universe to discover new knowledge. The United States excels at this
paradigm and must continue to sustain and nurture its rich intellectual infrastructure.

The essence of engineering, on the other hand, is integrating all knowledge for some purpose. As society's
"master integrators," engineers must provide leadership in the concurrent and interactive processes of
innovation and wealth creation. The engineer must be able to work across many different disciplines and
fields--and make the connections that will lead to deeper insights, more creative solutions, and getting
things done. In a poetic sense, paraphrasing the words of Italo Calvino (1988), the engineer must be adept at
correlating exactitude with chaos to bring visions into focus.

Added Value
Today's engineering students will spend most of their careers coping with challenges vastly different from
those experienced by engineers of the last half-century. The intellectual skills of tomorrow's engineers will
extend well beyond the traditional science-focused preparation that has characterized engineering education
since World War II. The factors contributing to this new thrust include global commercial competition (a
major driver for industrial organization and engineering employment); opportunities offered by "intelligent"
technology; an eclectic, constantly changing work environment calling for astute interpersonal skills; and
growing awareness of the need to place environment, health, and safety at the beginning of the design
process.

U.S. engineering graduates should provide added value in order to compete in today's global marketplace,
not only added value resulting from state-of-the-art knowledge, but also that resulting from an
understanding of risk and participation in the process of engineering throughout their educational
experience.

Engineers know that scientific and mathematical skills are necessary for professional success. An
engineering student nevertheless must also experience the "functional core of engineering"--the excitement
of facing an open-ended challenge and creating something that has never been. Participating in the process
of realizing a new product through the integration of seemingly disparate skills is an educational imperative.
This is the ultimate added value that enables wealth creation. In this sense, the 21st-century engineer must
have the capacity to:

• design, in order to meet safety, reliability, environmental, cost, operational, and maintenance
objectives;
• realize products;
• create, operate, and sustain complex systems;
• understand the physical constructs and the economic, industrial, social, political,
and international context within which engineering is practiced;
• understand and participate in the process of research; and
• gain the intellectual skills needed for lifelong learning.

The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset presaged today's challenge in engineering education
when he wrote in his Mission of the University (1930):
The need to create sound syntheses and systemizations of knowledge . . . will call out a
kind of scientific genius which hitherto has existed only as an aberration: the genius for
integration. Of necessity this means specialization, as all creative effort does, but this time
the [person] will be specializing in the construction of the whole. (p.70)

Translating these concepts into a viable curriculum raises a core set of issues and challenges for the
engineering education enterprise. For starters, it requires examining the traditional reductionist approach to
teaching and learning.

Most curricula require students to learn in unconnected pieces. They take separate courses whose
relationship to each other and to the engineering process is not explained until late in their undergraduate
education, if ever. Further, engineering curricula usually present the set of topics engineers "need to know,"
leading to the feeling that an engineering education is simply a collection of courses. While the content of
the courses may be valuable, this view of engineering education ignores the need for connections and
integration.

And what of fundamentals? What are the basic constructs of the engineering process? What does the phrase
"engineering is an integrative process" mean? Many of the components of a holistic baccalaureate
engineering education are identified in Box 1. The columnar arrangement and the row-by-row juxtaposition
of terms give the appearance contradiction. Moreover, the emphasis on the science base of engineering over
the past half-century has embraced the elements in the left-hand column, often to exclusion of those on the
right.
A holistic baccalaureate engineering education should emphasize the inherent connectivity and the
complementary nature of these two sets of elements. Tomorrow's engineers will need both abstract
and experiential learning, the ability to understand certainty and to handle ambiguity, to formulate
and solve problems, to work independently and in teams, and to meld engineering science and
engineering practice. Put simply, our aim now should be to achieve some balance between the
corresponding elements in each row of Box 1.

This effort can lead us, in a scholarly way, to realizing Ortega's "construction of the whole." Certainly,
today's easier access to information and improved connectivity will enable engineers (indeed everyone) to
make more productive connections to learn and create. This combination of access and connectivity may
well prove to be the key enabler for Ortega's vision.

Engineering education should therefore shift emphasis from course content (and the consequent
filtering out of students) to a more comprehensive view, a view that focuses on the development of
human resources and the broader educational experience in which individual courses and experiences
are connected and integrated. This intent is made more facile in an era of knowledge and distributed
intelligence.

Thus, a vision of engineering education for the 21st century can be based on developing, in as
individualized a way as possible, the following capabilities (National Science Foundation, 1989) in each
student:

• Integration: recognition of engineering as an integrative process in which analysis and synthesis are
supported with sensitivity to societal need and environmental fragility.
• Analysis: critical thinking that underlies problem definition (modeling, simulation,
experiment, optimization)--derived from an in-depth understanding of the
physical, life, and mathematical sciences, as well as the humanities and social
sciences.
• Innovation and synthesis: creating and implementing useful systems and products,
including their design and manufacture.
• Contextual understanding: appreciating the economic, industrial, and international
environment in which engineering is practiced and the ability to provide societal
leadership effectively.

Many U.S. graduate programs, while rigorous and in-depth, are too narrowly focused to appeal to the
professionally oriented engineer who is concerned with career-enabling subjects such as manufacturing,
construction, systems integration, environmental technologies, quality control, safety, and management of
technological innovation. Most of this content can be addressed in a master's program, but too often the
program is configured as a "stepping stone" to the reductionist-oriented Ph.D.

Today, there is growing consensus that professional engineers need an integrative master's degree and that
our universities need to offer more practice-oriented master's degree programs that have stronger
connections to industry and to the social, economic, and management sciences. Even the doctoral degree is
being challenged as too analytic and too oriented toward subspecialties. There is growing momentum,
across all of science and engineering, to reorient the Ph.D. curriculum in a way that enables graduates to
enjoy a broader spectrum of career opportunities, while sustaining the rich educational enhancement derived
from the process of doing research. As the COSEPUP report noted: "A world of work that has become more
interdisciplinary, collaborative, and global requires that we produce young people who are adaptable and
flexible, as well as technically proficient" (COSEPUP, 1995, p.2).
How we might "enable the next generation engineer" is depicted in Figure 1. The complementary
components of a holistic undergraduate curriculum lead to a practice-oriented master's-level curriculum
and/or an integrative, discovery-focused doctoral curriculum--all supported by infrastructures for cognitive
systems and career-long learning.

It is no overstatement to say that the word "potential" has never been as meaningful as it is today. Potential
conveys possibility, opportunity, and capability--all of which exist in abundance as we enter an era of
knowledge and distributed intelligence. Internet browsers have transformed the information superhighway
from an obscure research tool to something a five-year-old can "surf." Search engines help people control
the flood of information unleashed by the Web.

Moreover, what we are seeing today is only the beginning. Supercomputers are now breaking the teraflop
barrier. Today's experimental networks, such as the NSF-supported very-high-speed Backbone Network
Service, transmit data in excess of 600 megabits per second, a twelve-fold increase over current Internet
operating speeds.

If history is any guide, it won't take long for these capabilities to reach the typical user. When combined
with technologies such as palmtops, handhelds, intelligent agents, and omnipresent sensors, the potential
before us takes on an entirely new dimension. Information will be available in forms that make it easier for
everyone to use effectively--voice, video, text, holograms, to name but a few of a universe of possibilities.
Will we develop new ways to express and unleash our creative talents, talents that are now limited by our
ability to interface via a QWERTY keyboard and mouse? What tools will enable us to control and master
this ultrarapid flow of information? Will having the results of the Library of Congress effectively in your
pocket be a blessing or a burden?

The answers to these questions begins with engineers. Our efforts and our leadership can transform this
immense, unprecedented, and somewhat intimidating potential into true progress, economic opportunity,
social gain, and rising living standards.

The first step must be reform of our system of education and training for scientists and engineers.
Engineering and science education has become much more than a 4-year bachelor's degree or 7-year Ph.D.
It now requires strengthening and continually refreshing our talents for innovation and creativity.
Professional societies will need to assume greater responsibility for enabling their members to thrive
through change. Universities will need to embrace new mechanisms for interacting with students, as well as
for linking the creation of knowledge with its dissemination and application.

The spread of digital libraries; the onset of virtual collaboratives; the capacity to mine data with alacrity; the
assurance of high-confidence systems for privacy, security, and reliability; and the creation of knowledge-
on-demand pedagogies have ushered in a promising new era of discovery, innovation, and progress.

This presents the engineering community with the opportunity--and the responsibility--to sustain and
expand the connections to learning and creativity that Academus launched with his gift to Plato 2 millennia
ago. These connections will in no small way help determine U.S. prosperity well into the next century. Our
efforts and our leadership hold the key to success.

References
Calvino, Italo. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Cerf, V.G. Computer networking: Global infrastructure for the 21st century. Available at:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/
homes/lazowska/cra/networks.html, February 18, 1997.
COSEPUP. 1995. Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers. Washington, D.C.:
National Academy Press.

Drucker, P.F. 1992. Managing for the Future: The 1990s and Beyond. New York: Truman Talley
Books/Plume.

National Science Board. 1996. Science and Engineering Indicators--1996. (NSB 96-21). Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office.

National Science Foundation. 1989. Imperatives in Undergraduate Engineering Education: Issues and
Actions. Report of an NSF Ad Hoc Task Force. August. Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

Ortega y Gasset, J. 1992. Mission of the University. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

Smerdon, E.T. 1995. Lifelong Learning for Engineers: Riding the Whirlwind. The Bridge 26(1&2):15-17.
Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Engineering.

Smith, B.L.R., and C.E. Barfield. Eds. 1995. Technology, R&D, and the Economy. Washington, D.C.: The
Brookings Institution and The American Enterprise Institute.

U.S. Council of Economic Advisors. 1995. Supporting research and development to promote economic
growth: The federal government's role. October. Working paper available:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/CEA/econ/html/ econ-top.html. March 3, 1997.

Vest, C.M. 1995. U.S. Engineering Education in Transition. The Bridge 25(4):4-9. Washington, D.C.:
National Academy of Engineering.
About the Author
Joseph Bordogna is assistant director for engineering in the Engineering Directorate of the National Science
Foundation.