What's Wrong with Engineering Education From an Engineer's Point of View?

A lot of the difference between a beginner and an expert in engineering is to do with having a feeling for what matters. Expert engineers know which things are not going to work. They know the key metrics and heuristics which allow them to cut through complexity to be able to reliably predict the outcomes of situations which no-one can fully understand.

Vincenti explains all of this very well in "What Engineers Know and How They Know It", with the specific example of the "Flying Quality" of aircraft. Many educationalists would no doubt deny the possibility of the establishment of any reliable metrics for learning, let alone ingenuity, but I disagree.

I think that any good engineer can reliably and reproducibly tell a good engineer from a poor one sufficiently well to control the process of engineering education. Let us call the property they are estimating in making this judgement ingenuity.

As a good engineer I can tell from their average level of ingenuity that either the candidates I have been sent to make into engineers have been poorly selected, or (if these are indeed the best candidates available), the pool of sufficiently ingenious candidates is small.

I am not sure that I can see any significant differences in ingenuity between candidates of different genders, sexualities, skin colours and so on. It would not matter if I could, as it would be illegal for me to discriminate between candidates on these grounds (unless of course I was discriminating "positively", which I would rather not do).

Much of the discussion of how to improve engineering education centres on increasing numbers, both in general and of "under-represented" groups. The view of who is under-represented is however highly politicized. The great under-representation of the children of the working classes in engineering education is not apparently not a problem. The lack of a 50:50 gender ratio is however thought to be a problem. This is an ideological position, not a rational one. It is a political judgement, whose truth or otherwise is based on the acceptance or rejection of certain set of values and associated axioms.

We might set aside the issue of whether these values and axioms are right, and ask if this approach is likely to work, and if there is any evidence that it is working. But first we would have to agree about what "working" means. This is a problem I have come across many times in professional engineering practice. What is needed to resolve it rationally is an agreed metric.

In my recent discussions with Kel and Peter from the RAE, it seems clear to me that the immediate aims of the RAE's activities in encouraging applications to engineering courses are to produce twice as many engineering graduates, but that their ultimate aim is to produce more good engineers.

There is an implicit assumption in these approaches that more applicants in general, and more female applicants in particular will automatically lead to more good engineers. But this does not follow, whichever way you read the data on applications to engineering courses.

My belief is that we already train too many engineers in general, and poor engineers in particular. Even Peter's own figures suggest that almost half of our graduates are not being employed as engineers, and I think this analysis underestimates the problem due to the poor quality of its source data. Most professional engineers (including myself) think that today's engineering graduates lack ingenuity, and consider many of them unemployable as engineers.

The RAE's argument is that because some engineering courses have to go to "clearing" to make their numbers, we are not oversupplied with candidates. This to my mind still leads us to the conclusion that we have too many places available if our aim is to produce good engineers. Going to clearing means that these courses are taking on second choice students. If we believe that A-levels are measuring something which correlates with ingenuity, this dropping of standards reduces our chances of making good engineers.

Engineers have a feeling for the correct level of analysis. I have previously explained why I think analysis at the STEM level is unhelpful. Now I would like to explain why I think analysis at the "Engineering " level is unhelpful. Let us take the example of Chemical Engineering and Civil Engineering courses.

Even though only half of Chem Eng graduates get jobs as engineers, there has been a massive expansion in numbers and tariffs on Chem Eng Courses, and several new courses are being accredited. This may well be something to do that Chem Eng is the highest paid branch of engineering in the UK, more well paid than medicine. Chem Eng courses are 27% female, and Biochem Eng courses even closer to gender parity.

Contrast this with the least well paid branch of UK engineering, Civil Engineering. Civ Eng can't fill its courses, and it can't get the girls. So Civil Engineering may have a problem - does Chem Eng have the same problem? I think not. In my opinion Chem Eng is probably exceeding, and certainly approaching the saturation point for willing and able female candidates.

So it seems to me that in a system where we charge students £36K for an entry level engineering qualification, they are voting with their feet for the courses most likely to give a good return on their investment. Anyone who didn't wouldn't be a good candidate to be an engineer.

So it does not follow that some courses having difficulty making their numbers means that there is a crisis of recruitment in engineering courses. This might be a crisis for those working in the Civ Eng department, but if students don't care, and employers already have twice as many candidate as they need, why should engineering care? If we end up with too few civil engineers, it will presumably become better paid, but the laws of supply and demand suggest there are too many of them at present.

As well as the differences between disciplines, there are accredited and unaccredited courses, and courses at higher and lower status institutions. If the unaccredited courses at third rate institutions intended to cheat ill-informed students of their money (because institution and course status is often more important in the UK job market than degree classification) have difficulties filling their courses, this need not trouble Imperial College.

Employers have a vested interest in oversupply of labour, and even good universities will to some extent lay on courses for anyone willing to pay. Law now produces six times as many graduates as there are jobs as solicitors and barristers, and wages (though not fees) have crashed. We trained far too many pharmacists in recent years and what was a secure and well paid job has become akin to that of a shop assistant for many of those lucky enough to have jobs at all.

So when we strip out the unhelpful generalizations, special pleading and propaganda from vested interests, we see the following:

There is no general shortage of graduate engineers (or both employment rates and wages for graduates would be higher)

There may be local shortages of certain kinds of engineers and engineering students (but paying professional engineers more money can fix them)

Training more engineers will on the other hand not fix this problem, as it will (by increasing supply in a market which is already oversupplied) decrease both wages and the chances of employment for graduates and hence the attractiveness of undertaking our challenging and expensive courses.

Encouraging women to study engineering will not fix this problem (as there is no evidence that the profession suffers in any way because women generally prefer medicine to engineering)

It seems from Chem Eng's example that if it is politically desirable to increase the number of women in engineering education, paying engineers more seems to work.

So it looks to me as if much of what is presently being done is entirely wrong-headed, based in an uncritical acceptance of political propaganda.

We can however always use more good engineers. Maybe if we produced more of them we might once more have an economy based on designing and making things, driven by these good engineers.

In my opinion, many of the half of engineering graduates who get jobs as engineers should think themselves  lucky. More than 75% of them will never be good engineers. I have seen them in education, and I have seen them in practice, and they are just making up the numbers in my opinion.

I cannot tell reliably why this is. Have we already dipped to the bottom of the pool of natural engineers? Are engineers born or made? How can we reliably measure ingenuity? Can we foster it, and if so how? Are our present metrics of quality well correlated with ingenuity?

The answers to these questions are the key to making more of the good engineers we all think are needed. If we wasted less time on political agendas we'd have more time to find answers to them.

Making Engineers: Lessons from the iFoundry#1: Words Matter

One of the key benefits identified by those responsible for the iFoundry (an attempt to bring Olin's groundbreaking approach to engineering education to the University of Illinois) was students' enhanced identification as engineers.

They were not the first to think that this was an important aspect of engineering education. Curtin University of Technology in Australia addresses its students as ‘student engineers’."There is a subtle but important distinction between an engineering student and a student engineer."

Like iFoundry faculty Curtin think that the words they use are important. In " A Whole New Engineer", the account of the founding of the iFoundry, they cite the Heath Brothers book "Made to Stick" about how the use of "sticky language" can make the difference between success and failure in change management.

Words do matter. Today's "engineering students" (being given a STEM education by scientists and mathematicians who tell them that they are being prepared to be the oompa loompas of science) identify as part of STEM.

Many of the brightest become "STEM ambassadors", persuading more kids (especially girls) to study STEM subjects, even though we already have a massive oversupply of both candidates and graduates in engineering education.

So, our best and brightest students have had their enthusiasm and goodwill to others exploited to serve an ideological agenda and the promotion of the interests of non-engineers. It's a sad state of affairs.

iFoundry encourages these keen and idealistic students to take part in activities such as Engineers without Borders, using their skills and knowledge to serve real needs, and identifying with their fellow engineers around the world. This is encouraging students to identify as engineers, and bringing them into our community of practice.

We would argue that we need to take the E out of STEM, because all most people hear is the first word. They think it's all science. In "A Whole New Engineer" they trace this fallacy back to the lack of understanding of the distinction between the four parts of STEM of the American military in the Second World War. So STEM basically means the same as "Boffin", but we are not boffins, we are engineers. Even scientists don't want to be boffins.

Scientists and mathematicians didn't make the atomic bomb for those WWII generals, put men on the moon, or create today's ubiquitous electronic devices and air travel for all. Engineers did all that and more. We made today's world. Scientists are our ugly friend - we will need to shake them off if they are going to steal our clothes.

What Aren't The Problems of Teaching Engineering - And Why Are These The Issues We Are Addressing? #2: "The Lack of Women"

We engineers tend not to fix things which ain't broke, and if our fix doesn't work, we consider the possibility that we may have misunderstood the problem. We also tend to fix the biggest problem first. If only more engineers were involved in education. We might get a few problems solved, and waste less time on non-problems like the supposed shortage of women in engineering.

A great deal of effort goes into figuring out why women don't study STEM subjects and/or figuring out how to get them to do so. I am not however sure that the problem addressed by these efforts actually exists, especially in the field of engineering education. As the graphic shows if there is any imbalance in engineering, it is pretty trivial compared with a reverse problem in other professions.

The broad brush of the STEM classification obscures rather than assists analysis, as discussed previously. Two of the three subjects in which women are most proportionally overrepresented (courses related to veterinary and human medicine, and education) are often classed as STEM subjects.

During the time that these efforts have been made to persuade more girls to study STEM subjects at school, the gender divide has actually worsened in the most gender segregated courses like veterinary and computer science. We might speculate that getting more girls to do STEM A levels has just upped the number of applicants for STEM courses which fit with traditional gender roles.

Then there are all of the things which are not apparently problems: the over-representation of women throughout HE is not a problem. (The only groups proportionally underrepresented in UK HE are "White" and "Afro-carribean" working class males). The under-representation of men on the courses which women dominate is apparently not a problem (though a few others have noticed this). So why is it felt that the shortage of women on engineering courses is a problem?

It doesn't appear to be a real problem either for engineering, or for the women who want to study engineering as far as I am aware. Having encountered many female engineers in both education and practice, we haven't noticed them bringing as a class anything special to the table. They are not noticeably better or worse than men at the day to day business of engineering. Engineering does not seem to be missing out by not being half female, and there is (as discussed previously) an oversupply of both those wanting to study engineering, and engineering graduates.

In educationalist circles all kinds of benefits which might in theory accrue from a greater number of women studying and practising engineering are discussed, but they are not apparent in practise. Of course education is as disproportionately female as engineering is male-dominated, so the consensus opinion of educationalists is not gender bias-free.

Why do less women than men study and practice engineering? "stereotypes within the education system, norms governing gender roles in the household that constrain a woman’s choice of occupation", or to put it another way, they don't want to, generally speaking.

So women are not studying these subjects because they do not want to. Isn't the right number of women studying engineering as many as are capable of doing so, and want to? Who are educationalists to tell women what to want?

There is no evidence to suggest that that women are more innovative or otherwise better engineers than men, though there is an argument that more diverse teams are more innovative. Diversity is however even more slippery as a concept than "STEM". The missing diversity in HE appears to be a social class. If we are going to start carrying out social engineering, that is arguably where we should start.

But if we do want more women in engineering for ideological reasons, we need to promote Engineering to them, not "STEM". Promoting STEM to girls, and getting them to do more STEM A-levels appears to have simply further imbalanced the gender ratios in the subjects they do want to study.

Or why not follow Olin's lead, and based on the understanding that engineering is not applied science and maths, take in students without STEM A-levels. This would widen the pool of female candidates by allowing them in with the A-levels they do want to study.

The problem with engineering education is however not a lack of women. It is a lack of engineers, and a consequent lack of understanding in educational circles of what engineering is.

If this mistaken understanding of what engineering is about has an unwanted side-effect of excluding women who would like to be engineers, that should be one more small nail in "STEM"'s coffin. Such a situation would be inequitable, and in many countries, illegal.

We are not however aware that any inability of suitably qualified and motivated women to get on engineering courses, or to practice as engineers has actually been proven. If it is true, why has no-one been prosecuted in those countries where sex discrimination is illegal?

The arguments about a supposed lack of women on engineering courses seems to be based squarely on an unexamined axiom that the ratio should be at least 50:50 (or arguably more, as women outnumber men in the population, and outnumber them still more in HE) Why?

Engineering Education: "Assessment Drift"

Celebrated educationalist James Atherton has given us a mention on his blog here. Thanks, James!

What Aren't The Problems of Teaching Engineering - And Why Are These The Issues We Are Addressing? #1: "The STEM Shortage"

Those in engineering education whose hearts are in the right place have a vague feeling that there is something wrong with the education they are providing.

It is however made very hard for them to identify the real problem, as the discussions are dominated by discussions of non-problems.

The first of these is the supposed STEM shortage. Our well-meaning investigator talks to supposed experts, and reads the educational press and they are given a strong impression that the real problem in engineering education is a shortage of STEM graduates.

It is however far from clear that there is a shortage of STEM graduates as Stephen Gorard and The Atlantic Magazine pointed out a few years ago. The data simply is not there to support what has become the basis for almost all discussions of the subject. Those who get jobs as engineers may attract high wages, but only half of engineering graduates get to work as engineers.

There are vested interests who might wish all discussions to be based on this axiom. Universities, Employers, and Engineering Institutions all largely support the myth of the STEM shortage, arguably for reasons of self-interest.

In the UK, universities are ranked on their ratio of applications to accepted candidates. In many engineering courses this ratio may be as high as 10:1. There is no shortage of willing candidates for engineering degrees.

This does not however mean that university admissions tutors wouldn't like this marker of status to be higher. A higher ratio allows them to be pickier about the "tariff" of examination grades they will accept from candidates. This tariff is also a marker of status, reported in ranking tables.

There is no apparent upper limit to aspirations in these areas by universities, but this is nothing to do with making more or better engineers, as the pre-university exams have nothing to do with engineering ability. It is about managing the status of their institution.

A level results may correlate with degree classification, but degree classification does not have a simple relationship with ability as an engineer. This is in my opinion due to the lack of engineering in engineering degrees.

So if there is no evidence to support the idea that there is a shortage of applicants for STEM courses, perhaps there is (as employers organizations regularly claim), a shortage of STEM graduates?

Not only is there no evidence for that, there is strong evidence to the contrary. An uncomfortably high proportion of STEM graduates cannot get jobs in STEM. Surely if there are shortages, even our poorest graduates would be snapped up, and wages would be rising? But that's not what is happening.

If there is no shortage of STEM workers, why would employers' organizations say that there is? As with so many things in this debate, much lies in confusion over terms. Sometimes this lies with the authors of press releases, and often with journalistic misunderstanding.

A "STEM shortage" might be a local shortage of staff with certain specific training, shortages of time-served tradesmen, shortages of doctors, or simply a shortage of workers willing to work for what employers are offering.

A shortage of trained staff might be fixed by an employer being willing to train. The present shortage of time-served staff was caused by persuading 50% of young people to go into HE. Shortages of doctors have nothing to do with supply of engineers, and the last category is entirely soluble by a wage rise.

This last is presumably the reason why employers institutions are supportive of  the myth of the STEM shortage - oversupply will drive down wages.

What we are NOT short of is people willing to undertake accredited engineering degrees, or STEM (including engineering) graduates. There is clear oversupply of both of these things (in some cases massive oversupply as with UK pharmacists at present)

We may be short of chartered engineers, though the answer to this is not to allow non-engineers (people without at a minimum accredited degrees in engineering, and ideally with five years of experience as an engineering practitioner) to carry the title, as our engineering institutions have done.

In any case, STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Maths/Medicine) is too broad a brush. It is the cause of engineering institutions being involved in campaigns which are of no benefit to engineers in particular or society in general.

Our institutions send people into schools to promote STEM, rather than engineering, but even promoting engineering in schools is often wrong-headed. The only beneficiaries of yet more unsuccessful applicants to wildly oversubscribed engineering courses are the universities.

As we are already producing worldwide around twice as many engineering graduates as there are jobs for, one would think that there is little point in expanding engineering education provision, but the debate is so ill-founded in HE that that is exactly what we are doing.

The STEM conflation is also the cause of the major problem of engineering education. It supports the many people in university engineering departments who think that they are providing a STEM education rather than an engineering one. They consequently make students learn irrelevant science and maths, and employ scientists and mathematicians to teach them.

There will always be a shortage of excellent engineers - even in engineering practice there aren't that many. My students mostly have three As at A-level, but I would consider only about 10% to really have the knack for engineering which is needed to make a great engineer. There is no real sign of a STEM shortage, but there does appear to be a knack shortage. I will discuss what I think the reasons for this are in another post.

Engineering Educators: You're Doing it Wrong!

Some of us on here are practicing engineers, so we know what engineers do. We know what engineering is about. We know the tools and techniques which engineers use.

We also all went through a university education on courses which shared a name with our profession.

Some of us also teach on such courses, and some are involved in accreditation of these courses on behalf of engineering institutions.

We are concerned that there are very many people who have not practiced engineering involved in either teaching or accreditation.

Most of the people involved in teaching and accreditation are either researchers or managers. They do not personally do research, or carry out engineering duties such as design or technical support of engineering operations. They manage these activities, but they do not do them. Some of them do not even have first degrees in engineering.

So those greatly influential in the content and delivery of engineering degrees do not understand what engineers do, or how they do it. Many of them have never practiced the discipline, and often think of real engineers as their social and intellectual inferiors.

Many think that the "purer" subjects in which they have first degrees are more intellectually demanding than real engineering. Perhaps they think that teaching abstract theory irrespective of its relevance to engineering practice is "an education", but teaching practically relevant material is the vastly inferior "training", fit only for technicians.

So teaching students to use "MATLAB", a maths program which is used to write programs in a research setting (though entirely unused by practitioners for QA reasons) is education, but teaching students to use "Autocad", the industry standard drawing package is mere training.

Teaching students to carry out the mathematical transforms which were important to the electrical engineers of long ago is education (even if the students are not studying electrical engineering), teaching them qualitative knowledge about how instruments and actuators can be put together to form an effective control system is "training".

Teaching students a dumbed - down version of a philosopher's idea of ethics is education, teaching them real professional ethics is training.

There is a useful area of philosophy which no-one seems to teach as part of engineering degrees - epistemology. This is the study of the basis of knowledge, and knowledge to a philosopher is "true justified belief".

If we were really going to teach students how to think, we should be teaching them about the ways in which engineering has a different epistemology from science or mathematics. Engineering is not founded in science or mathematics, nor does it share their foundations. How could something which predates science and mathematics be founded in them?

Our beliefs as engineers are justified by experience: a combination of personal experience, and collective experience, in both cases usually codified by heuristics. These heuristics may take the form of codes of practice, design standards, rules of thumb, or cautionary tales. Best practice in engineering has been defined by BV Koen as following the most current commonly held heuristics amongst active practitioners.

Those who think that you can do engineering from mathematical or scientific first principles have never practiced the profession. Teaching maths and natural science is not teaching engineering. Unwillingness to understand when you are doing it wrong isn't even good science.