Engineering Education Prepares for 2020

By Richard Goering

February 5, 2007

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Engineering education for 2020 and beyond will require a variety of skills not commonly taught in universities today, according to Leah Jamieson, dean of engineering at Purdue University and 2007 IEEE president. The need to teach attributes like creativity, flexibility, leadership, and business acumen will drive a demand for an "experiential" approach to education, she said.

Jamieson was keynote speaker at the DesignCon 2007 conference. "In many ways, the world is changing," she observed. "Are our graduates going to have the skills they need over the next 40 years?"

Drivers for change, she said, include new multidisciplinary technologies, an unprecedented rate of technological change, globalization, and offshoring. The "half life" of an engineer's knowledge -- the point at which half of what the engineer knows is obsolete -- may now be as little as five years, she said.

"If it's below five years, we'll get scared," Jamieson said. "That means that by the time we're done with a graduate, half of what we did will not be relevant. We ask ourselves what will stay relevant, so they'll at least be current the day the graduate."

Jamieson noted that there's been a declining interest in engineering majors in the U.S. "There is a sense that engineering is not attractive in the U.S. in the way it used to be, and we're trying to understand our role in that," she said. Meanwhile, Jamieson noted, there's an "explosion" in the engineering workforce in China and a growing workforce in India, while the U.S. engineering workforce is stable or shrinking.

Moreover, she noted, there's been no progress with diversity since the mid 1990s, in terms of attracting women or minorities to engineering.

Jamieson briefly reviewed a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) report about engineering in 2020. It paints a picture of "breakthrough technologies" such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and photonics, applied within an urban physical infrastructure.

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