The Meaning of Silence

Most of us who write on here have written articles on the problems of engineering education in print publications.

These are usually published in engineer's professional journals or in the general press, as we have found it hard to get articles about the problems with engineering education published in journals controlled by educationalists.

Eventually we run into problems with even those publications which  will publish articles about the mismatch between engineering degrees and the engineering profession.

If we are bold and forthright in our criticism of current practice, we are told that we cannot say anything which might be thought disrespectful of individuals.

If we are more diplomatic, we are told that our new articles on the subject are just rehashing what we said before, as they have the same basic theme.

The response to the articles is consistently positive from practitioners. The most interesting thing is the response from academics. Silence. They generally speaking don't have a thing to say in public about these issues.

They only want to talk to people who agree with their basic axiom that engineering is the straightforward application of the far more difficult maths and science which they know about.

If you suggest that engineering is not the application of natural science and maths - silence.

If you suggest that the graduates they are producing are not fit to become engineers- silence.

If you suggest that a practitioner might know hard things that an academic does not - silence.

If you suggest that putting scientists and mathematicians in charge of engineering education was a bad idea - the utter silence of censorship. Not only they, but you will be silenced.

So much for the principle of academic freedom. Some things may not be said, and will not be said in peer-reviewed academic journals, or professional engineering journals.

So what does the silence mean? You can pin down academics in a corridor, and get a few answers:

1. "That's just technician level knowledge"
2. "I'm in touch with one of our alumni, and he says that engineering practice is exactly as we in academia say it is"
3. "Oh, that's the kind of thing X always says, pay no attention to him"
4. "All of our graduates get good jobs - Where's the problem?"
5. "University is about Education, not mere Training"  
6. "I AM an engineer, so the stuff I teach IS engineering"
7. "All of the faculty agree that this is what engineering is about"

There are many others, but what they all have in common is their thought-avoiding dismissiveness.

Technicians know things many professors do not. Much of this knowledge is needed to become a professional engineer, but most of what is missing is not known by technicians or academics. The technician level knowledge argument is an insult to professional engineers and technicians masquerading as an argument. Professional engineers know the theory that academics know, as well as the practicalities that technicians and professional engineers know. They will tell you that engineering is far more complex than the things they were taught in university.

The kind of alumnus who keep in touch with the kind of person who tries the "one of our alumni once told me" argument tends to be a bit of a suck-up. n=1 would not impress this kind of academic in any other sphere, but when it comes to confirmation bias, any datapoint which agrees with prejudice will do.

"That's the kind of thing X always says" is a straightforward ad hominem attack, backed again only by a lack of criticality founded in confirmation bias. Maybe that is what X always says, but please explain why he is wrong.

Data in this area is very flaky, but not so bad that we cannot say with some confidence that all of your graduates do NOT get good jobs. Many of them may not get jobs at all, and most of them will not get jobs as engineers. Would people teaching medicine be as unconcerned if less than half of their output were thought fit to practice?

Education vs training is the expression of snobbery of people who don't know what engineers do, but think that what they know is smarter than what engineers know, despite their not knowing what engineers know.

The researchers who say that they are engineers may have a point, but usually they don't. I read books by people like Vincenti, and I meet some academics who clearly know what engineering is about. I'm happy to call such people research engineers. It is very notable that such people's research is very directly useful to, and involves talking to practicing engineers.

"All of our faculty agree..." All of your faculty agree that if they are wrong about what engineering is they are going to have to do a great deal of work learning a subject they know next to nothing about from people they consider their social and intellectual inferiors. No-one will give them any reward for this work, and before they can do it, they will have to agree that they are the oompa loompas of engineering rather than the other way round.

What does the silence mean? It means that the present approach to engineering education is as morally bankrupt as it is intellectually lazy. It means that they hope we'll stop knocking if they ignore the door for long enough.

How Can Almost Everyone Else Be Wrong, and Knud Right?

Everything I have written here is based on my claim that the entire foundation for all learned discussion of engineering education is fundamentally wrong. How is it possible that I could be right, or to put it another way, how is it possible that so many learned others are wrong?

It is not as implausible as it seems that this one small pseudonymous voice on the internet might be righter than the great and the good of the RAE, Engineering Institutions, Government, countless University Engineering and Education Departments, and his fellow professional engineers.

Firstly, those engineering departments contain very few engineers, as I define them. They may contain people who can do engineering, (or more commonly do some isolated aspect of engineering), but "Engineer" isn't just something which you do, it is something which you are.

There are disincentives for university lecturers to even learn about engineering, let alone become engineers. (These are rather selfish disincentives, but selfishness is taken for granted in academia) Promotion in academia mainly depends upon the quality and quantity of your research output. Scientific journals are deemed to have higher quality than engineering journals.

Teaching quality also comes into it nowadays, but this "teaching quality" is no such thing. The way it is measured is basically a measure of student happiness. The average engineering student likes realistic exercises, but not as much as they like spoon-feeding and high marks for low effort. It is therefore easy to manipulate. Teaching quality is in any case weighted far less heavily than research quality, so optimal teaching quality follows a j-curve.

So putting just enough effort into teaching to hit your institution's minimum teaching quality, whilst publishing as many non-engineering research papers as possible is the fast track to promotion. University lecturers are highly pressurized by management with respect to both research and teaching quality. Only the most exceptional have enough time to genuinely care about teaching. Few indeed have enough time to genuinely care about Engineering. Academics don't understand engineering.

So why don't the professionals make the academics teach what the profession needs? They also have no motivation to improve education of engineers. Their employers are not willing to pay them to do anything more than pay the odd visit to give a lecture of anecdotes from professional practice. We all know how little of our university education proved useful in professional life, but we don't give this much thought. We are too busy being engineers - it's an engrossing business. We are clear that "engineering education" is no such thing, but we have winner's complacency. We made it, so other real engineers can too. Engineers don't understand education.

If an Engineer should notice the irrelevance of the engineering education curriculum, and wish to change it, they will find another problem. Our engineering institutions are dominated by successful  academics, who have been selected in the way I explained above. I and several of my correspondents have found out by personal experience there is a great resistance to change embedded within these institutions, which brings to mind the Saber Tooth Curriculum. 

So the status quo sort of suits everyone involved in speaking for engineering education, and its associated profession. It brings in lots of blue-sky research money for universities, and allows practitioners to think of the irrelevant course they were made to pass as tests, whose actual content is irrelevant. Passing an engineering degree means to them simply that you are smart, hardworking and  and resilient. As I said, they don't understand education.

Engineerign employers do their own tests on the product of universities before employing them, and they reject at least half. As the selection process is pretty poor, most of this half are capable only of doing engineering. They will never be engineers. Employers consequently claim there is a shortage of engineers, and in a way they are right. Universities are not making engineers - they are making people who can do engineering.

The vested interests and narrow views of most academics, practitioners, institutions and employers stop them from seeing the inconvenient truth that what we need to do is make engineers. We could produce half as many engineering graduates as we do now, and industry would benefit far more than if we produced ten times as many of those who are presently making up the numbers on engineering courses.

But not all is lost. There are some who understand what engineers are about. Look here. Unfortunately, the system militates against anything being done about this.

Engineering Education: Are Degree Apprenticeships the Answer?

In James Atherton's post on our blog, he wondered whether the "call for a revival of graduate-level apprenticeships may finally be heeded".

It turns out it already has been, "Degree Apprenticeships" were rolled out mid-March, and we already had "Higher Apprenticeships", which allowed degree level study alongside vocational training.

There is however a problem with such approaches in a society as conscious of class nuance as the UK. As Alison Wolf pointed out, many consider vocational qualifications a great idea - for other people's children.The supposed equality of degrees in the UK is already a polite fiction.

In an article in "The Chemical Engineer" magazine discussing these changes,  they say "For hundreds of years, universities have offered up something philosophically different from vocational training courses - focussed on growing pure knowledge and understanding rather than simply making students ready for the world of work".

This sentence sums up a number of the key misunderstandings, generalizations, stupidities and manifestations of snobbery which will make any "Degree Apprenticeship" a second rate qualification in the UK.

What for example is "pure knowledge and understanding"?  Whatever that might be, it is nothing to do with engineering. Engineering may be "impure" in the sense of being applied and practical, but the application of the positive value judgement "pure" to knowledge and understanding is simply snobbery. Knowledge itself is neither pure nor impure, except that we judge it so.
 
The original purpose of universities was monkish study. Insisting that everything which takes place in universities has to conform with earlier ideas of their purpose is illogical. It is analogous to the lexical "root fallacy" where the true meaning of a word is its supposed original one. Words change their meanings, as do institutions. If it were ever true that universities were ever about what TCE magazine says they were, they aren't now.

In any case, chemical engineering only made it into universities in 1887. There can be no appeal to hundreds of years of tradition by chemical engineers. That first chemical engineering course (delivered by George E Davis, a practical working engineer and chemist now seen as the founding father of chemical engineering) was criticized by contemporary snobbish academic purists for being mere "commonplace know-how".

Such are the roots of chemical engineering, but it seems that it wishes it were higher-born. Medicine doesn't seem to worry about being a practical business, why should we? But of course in the UK, medicine is a profession, and an "engineer" rods your drains.

The cartoon at the top shows the hierarchy of purity in academia. There was not room in the frame for those teaching apprentices, who would be around a metre to the left of the sociologist at the scale used. Rather than insisting that the answer is a new qualification (understood by all to be for working class children) we need to remind engineering that it was never pure.

To get a job as an engineer, graduates need nowadays to have already experienced work as an engineer. Industrial placements, internships and so on are on the CV of every smart budding engineer.

So, what is the difference between a supposedly pure degree, with a year or so of industrial experience, and a job straight out of school with an applied degree on the side?

In terms of learning, nothing significant, (though there is every chance that the vocational students will be worked harder both at work and at university, and actually learn more). In a society alert to every shade of class distinction, everything.

The apprenticeship route will not be competing with Russell Group universities for the "best" A-level students, it is for the bright working class kids who don't get those grades. It will lock them into the slow lane in their professional lives, just as we have seen the old degree level technical apprenticeships do to those who took them.