Engineering Education Must Get Real

Today, academics spend a great deal of time--and money--fretting over the state of "STEM" education. STEM--a clever acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics--attempts, wrongly in the author's view, to tightly associate educational enterprises that should be distinctly delineated. To be sure, STEM aims to promote study in areas that share similarities and are sometimes interdependent. However, the fact that engineering--a critically important profession--is thereby lumped with three very broad subject areas is troubling and indeed symptomatic of all that is wrong with engineering education today. In this article, the author argues that today, with all the issues of global competitiveness and pressing technological challenges, it is high time for American engineering academics to recognize these issues and truly embrace change.