Aspirations vs. Reality in Engineering Education: An Analysis of Top-Rated Institutions and Degree Programs.

Anyone who examines the websites of engineering colleges and degree programs can easily see that many of them articulate aspirations like those included in the National Academy of Engineering's The Engineer of 2020: Visions for the New Century (2004) and the statement from the MIT online course catalog reproduced above. To the extent that these aspirations have been realized, they justify public support for and investment in engineering education and research. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) commissioned the study that culminated in the Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century (2000), which provide ample evidence of "the power and promise of engineering." NAE president Bill Wulf emphasized the impact and human significance of these achievements when he introduced them: "if any of [the achievements on the list] were removed our world would be a very different place-and a much less hospitable one. The main criterion for selection was not technical 'gee whiz,' but how much an achievement improved people's quality of life" (Wulf, 2000). Combined with the aspirations of The Engineer of 2020, the Greatest Achievements present the appeal of an engineering career as extending far beyond the promise of lucrative employment. While the engineering achievements and their positive impact are well-established, it is not at all clear that engineering curricula systematically prepare graduates to develop and manage "complex technologies and products," "contribute directly to the betterment of humanity," or avoid unintended "negative results of technology [such as] Pollution, global warming, depletion of scarce resources, and catastrophic failures of poorly designed engineering" (2020, p. 48). The qualification "systematic" is particularly important here for two reasons. First, it takes into account the innovative pedagogical strategies and curricular designs that prepare some engineering students to achieve the vision of the Engineer of 2020. The proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), the Journal of Engineering Education, and numerous other publications document the quality and impact of these strategies and designs. These innovative programs, many of which have existed for long periods of time, demonstrate the feasibility of the kind of education envisioned for the Engineer of 2020. Second, the qualification "systematic" is also important because engineering education (including accreditation) is an enterprise permeated by the systematic articulation and maintenance of curricular standards that guarantee demonstrated competencies in all graduates. The research reported in this paper gathered detailed information from the websites of topranked engineering institutions and used it make an initial determination of the extent to which these aspirations are shared across a select group of elite institutions, the 10 best undergraduate engineering schools as ranked by U.S. News and World Report for 2020. We found that these aspirations are shared and align closely with the aspirations of The Engineer of 2020. We then gathered evidence about the curricula of the institutions to determine the extent to which the content of the curriculum aligns with the aspirations. The evidence that we gathered (and present in its entirety in the appendix to this paper) suggests that very few top-ranked institutions require exposure to the humanistic dimensions of engineering by integrating coursework that helps students understand the role engineers play in shaping the world, how they interact with other stakeholders, or what it takes to succeed in engineering practice. All of the institutions require courses in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) and specify distribution requirements across disciplines that could contribute to equipping engineering graduates to lead, manage, and shape the world, but these requirements are almost never directly related to engineering. After offering an overview of the origins of these themes and establishing why the term "humanistic" is appropriate, this paper describes the methods we used to reach these conclusions and discusses some of their implications before offering recommendations about future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]