The Daily gives us a fluff piece about former M President James Duderstadt’s plan for changing the way we educate engineers. And while I appreciate the fact Karl Stampfl took the time to read the lengthy (118 page) report, his writing gives us such gems as:

“The higher cost of living here means Americans cannot be cheaper labor - but they can be better-educated labor. They can be more imaginative.

Only, though, if they occupy some kind of niche. That niche may be a different breed of engineer, one who has the education not just to tinker but also to realize the larger effects of tinkering. An undergraduate liberal arts degree with a dual concentration in environmental sciences and public policy, for instance, gives the graduate automobile engineering student a new mindset. How can automakers be more environmentally conscious but stay profitable? How can we make a car that lessens our dependence on foreign oil? Should we even be talking about “cars” rather than “vehicles” or some other as-yet-unimagined type of transportation?

Those are the questions American engineers need to be asking themselves more often.”

Weird use of the word “tinkering” aside, it’s important to note that the Duderstadt Report doesn’t aim to guide students towards a specific discipline with the sole purpose of finding direct application towards one’s future studies as an engineer. The purpose of a broad liberal arts education is to create as broad and diverse a set of experiences as possible, that true engineering is the synthesis of seemingly abstract and disjoint concepts that creates a truly innovative solution.

The point is not to become a jack of all trades, and a master of none. Of course the paradigm of engineering has shifted in the past century or so: we’ve seen marked movements in merging art and engineering, living systems and non-living ones.  The point is not that engineers should not be aware of their social and environmental impacts (of course they are), but that we are not just living in an increasingly globally interdependent society, but an increasingly multidisciplinary society as well. So let’s not pretend that the engineer will be more prone to develop a eureka moment about reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil with his environmental sciences degree versus a deep collaboration with doctorate and years of research on this topic.

One of my regrets as an engineer is that I’ve not been able to have that “college experience” where I can take classes in a wide variety of departments to broaden my horizons. This is exceptionally important to the development of any person. But if we’re talking about having the American engineer compete with other engineers that demand lower wages, Stampfl’s assertion that somehow engineers don’t understand the greater impacts of their work, or that they can simply do the work of other fields of study in addition to their own just as well as the collective wisdom of many doesn’t hold up.

How the American engineer will compete, which the Duderstadt Report explicitly endorses, is the creation of new fields and areas not yet forseen. We’re talking about applications to seemingly purely theoretical concepts such as quantum technology, intelligent systems, and nanotech. So while joint concentrations in Public Policy and Environmental Science would of course be useful, the report suggests a stronger emphasis on an undergraduate curriculum that gets back to the basics. A strong focus in the physical sciences, where one learns problem solving techniques, but also an increased range of fundamental principles, will serve the engineer better in the long run (the long run implying further graduate study). It is asserted that increased focus on analysis and methodology only serves to teach students about processes that are becoming obsolete instead of asking them to pursue the previously unthinkable.

I think the Daily piece misinterprets the broader vision that the Duderstadt Report seeks to project. As for the report itself, I remain somewhat skeptical about the movement away from an undergraduate curriculum. In a globally interdependent society, the key to competition with other nations may not just lie in quality, but also a strong and vibrant quantity of workers that can foster new ideas to fruition. The shift to a graduate school-centric education will only push an increased number of students considering education away from the field, whether this due to a distaste for the amount of time it would take, to financial hardship that comes with paying for a university education, or the high opportunity costs of simply pursuing another subject. Overall though, the report does make important conclusions. We do need to encourage more students to pursue graduate study, we do need to change the way we educate people, and we do need to focus more on exploration and team work and discovery versus a boring lecture in memorizing formulas and analysis. But I am not convinced that to do so means that engineers should not be able to obtain a professional level degree at the undergraduate level. Engineering is considered one of the hardest undergraduate disciplines there is, and for good reason. In keeping this system we keep a larger number of people in a profession to foster its growth into the next generation and beyond.