Engineering education has lost contact with its related profession. University departments are, for the most part, staffed by scientists and graduates with no industry experience. And the graduates there have no real engineering knowledge: the courses they passed taught science and mathematics in place of engineering, contextualised only by their lecturer’s non-engineering research.
Degrees accredited by UK engineering institutions are supposed to provide the academic formation of a chartered engineer. Like many professionals, chartered engineers need both an academic education and professional training.
But education and training have become too separated. Universities believe their job is to provide a general scientific and mathematical education, with a view to producing the next generation of researchers. They don’t see it as their responsibility to create engineers – that’s down to industry.
The Conceiving, Designing, Implementing, Operating (CDIO) – an educational framework originally conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – has recognised this issue, and is making laudable efforts to address it. But even CDIO is run by university lecturers rather than engineers. Their solutions are, at times, too theoretical, and their contextualisation misses the mark.
Engineering departments need professional engineers. Much like the practitioners found in medical and law schools, they are capable of adding realism to university courses.
Professional engineering practice is mostly about exercising semi-intuitive professional judgement supported by back of the envelope calculations. Academic practice focuses on exercises which can be solved using the pure science, higher mathematics and computer modelling which interests lecturers. Real engineering problems are too complex to be addressed in this way.
One suspects that there might be a class issue at work here. Universities welcome surgeons and barristers to part-time teaching in a way they do not professional engineers. This may be explained by engineers unfortunately sharing a title with those men and women in overalls with dirty hands.
A talk to students by what are called industrialists in academia (people who have worked as engineers, aka engineers) is considered by academics an opportunity for a few amusing anecdotes, but lacking sufficient rigour to be taken seriously by either staff or students. The opinion of industrialists on what should be taught by universities is not really welcomed – though lecturers are smarmy enough to your face when you are giving out free lectures.
If you doubt the esteem in which real engineers are held, look at the makeup of the industrial advisory boards of engineering departments. In my experience, these “industrialists” (intended to keep courses relevant to the profession) are drawn entirely from the staff’s private sector researcher mates. Very few boards contain people who have designed, built, constructed or operated a full scale engineering project.
Then there is the fudge which has been cooked up by engineering institutions to obscure the almost complete absence of practitioners in engineering departments.
They have relaxed the requirements for becoming a chartered engineer, so that researchers with no engineering experience can become chartered. While in previous years you needed to have either designed or operated a full scale plant for five years and have an accredited degree, now you can get through without fulfilling either of these requirements.
In the interests of professional relevance, engineering institutions require accredited departments to have a certain percentage of in-house chartered engineers to run an engineering degree. Chartered engineers with no experience in engineering practice – while no doubt estimable – are not engineers, they are university lecturers. Some may have a PhD from an engineering department, but this is not an engineering qualification if its subject was scientific research.
It is not, as is often claimed, true that universities cannot afford proper engineers, as they tend to earn a lot more than university lecturers. Engineering departments usually generate large net surpluses – usually used to cross subsidise less financially viable university departments.
This money comes not from research, but from teaching. We do our students a disservice by choosing who will teach them based on who will work for the least money. When we are charging students the better part of £40K for their mandatory four year long courses, it seems unjustified penny-pinching.
It seems to me that we should bring in the engineering equivalent of medicine’s clinical professors, senior practitioners who will rebalance and contextualise our engineering science and applied mathematics courses with a little engineering pragmatism.
This week’s anonymous academic works at a Russell Group university.
More like this:
• View more blogs in our Academics Anonymous series
• Four ways to tempt more students to study engineering
Enter the Guardian university awards 2015 and join the Higher Education Network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter @gdnhighered.
