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A recent report from the National Science Foundation projected that employment in science and engineering occupations will increase approximately 70% faster than the overall growth rate for all occupations between 2002 and 2012 (National Science Board, 2006). For engineers, this projection translates to the addition of 976,000 new jobs during this 10-year period. In 2006, US colleges and universities graduated approximately 74,000 new bachelor΄s level engineers (American Society of Engineering Education, 2006). Assuming that US domestic production of engineers stays relatively constant, as it has over the last 20 years (see Fig. 7.1 National Science Board, 2006; Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, 2006), by the year 2012, the United States will fall short of this projected need by more than 200,000 engineers. Over this same period, the global supply of engineers is expected to increase, due to increasing production in countries such as China (Fig. 7.1). This trend, coupled with increasing economic globalization and the comparatively low percentage of students studying engineering or science in the United States (Fig. 7.2), has led many to conclude that US-based industry will globalize much of its engineering work for reasons of both cost and limited resource availability within the United States [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past year, articles by Grasso and others – including Holistic Engineering and Holistic Engineering and Educational Reform – have followed former IEEE President Joe Bordogna in adopting the term ˵holistic engineering″ to describe a more cross-disciplinary, whole-systems approach to engineering education. It is an approach that emphasizes contextualized problem formulation and encourages innovative changes to traditional engineering training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]