Webcast: Engineering Education in the 21st Century

Posted on October 26, 2008  Comments (5)

National Academy of Engineering President, William A. Wulf, discusses the future of engineering education. Very good quick overview (skip to 1m 45s point for start of the speech) – see links below for additional resources. From the speech:

  • “the practices of engineering has changed enormously in the last 20 years and engineering education has changed hardly at all.”
  • “It is a disgrace: about half the students who start in engineering do not finish in engineering… we are not weeding out the poor students we are turning off half the students with the way that we teach”
  • “engineering schools generally have not provided courses for the general liberal arts students but they must.”

view the rest of the talk

Related: Educating the Engineer of 2020: NAE Report – Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond by Charles Vest – Women Choosing Other Fields Over Engineering and Math – Educating Engineering Geeks – Leah Jamieson on the Future of Engineering Education – House Testimony on Engineering Education

5 Responses to “Webcast: Engineering Education in the 21st Century”

  1. Jeff Cumber
    December 17th, 2008 @ 2:11 pm

    I think these are good suggestions for the future of engineering education in colleges and universities, but I still think the majority of people are missing the boat. I run a high school engineering program, and I tend to focus on the middle school students and how they are being prepared. You need to focus on one grade level below where you are to make sure the students are prepared to be successful at the level you want them to be. The greatest gains colleges and universities can make is to invest in high school engineering and technology programs. The high schools will get the middle schools going, and so on. what you end up with is a fully integrated K-20 approach that will crank out engineering graduates in high numbers.

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    March 2nd, 2009 @ 7:54 pm

    I question the wisdom of a foundation urging innovation and then telling people to buy order their book to lean more. If a foundation wants to drive change today, I would think you do so by making material available online easily. Obviously they disagree…

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