The Chronicle: 7/9/2004: Battling the Image of 'a Nerd's Profession'

From the issue dated July 9, 2004

Battling the Image of 'a Nerd's Profession'

Universities devise programs to lure more students to engineering

By KELLY FIELD

Linda P.B. Katehi, Purdue University's dean of engineering, had seen the statistics. Applications were down at engineering schools. Foreign students, frustrated by visa delays, were staying home. Demand for engineers was expected to outpace supply. The United States was in danger of losing its scientific edge.

Alarmed by the reports, Ms. Katehi did what administrators often do: She formed a committee. Nine months later, in April, the nation's first department of engineering education was born.

The department, which will unite Purdue's existing freshman engineering department and its interdisciplinary engineering programs, will reach out to local high schools while looking into ways to make engineering more appealing to women and minorities. The goal, says Kamyar Haghighi, head of the new department, is to attract a more diverse group of students.

"If we are going to produce the world's best engineers, it is imperative to strengthen the pipeline" from elementary and secondary education, Mr. Haghighi says.

The number of high-school seniors who plan on careers in engineering has dropped almost 35 percent in the past 10 years, according to a survey by ACT, the standardized-test provider, of students who took its college-entrance exam. Women now account for only 18 percent of prospective engineers, and minorities 22 percent, according to the 2002 survey.

Those statistics, plus anticipated growth in the need for engineers, has prompted the American Society for Engineering Education, the National Research Council, and the National Academy of Engineering to call for a major overhaul of engineering education. The National Science Foundation unit that deals with engineering already provides about $200-million a year to support engineering education.

'The Softer Side of Engineering'

While Purdue is the first university to devote an academic department to engineering education, others are following suit. Several colleges have created centers to study engineering pedagogy. Virginia Tech recently established a department of engineering education and offered its first graduate course in the subject last spring.

Hassan Aref, dean of engineering at Virginia Tech, envisions the new department as a place where "the softer side of engineering will have a tenured home."

Despite the momentum behind such efforts, Purdue's new department has faced some skepticism from within.

"We have to convince faculty that this is a valuable area of research," says Mr. Haghighi.

Few high-school students are exposed to engineering. Nearly every high school teaches biology, chemistry, and physics, but only six states -- Arkansas, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Texas -- require engineering course work in their public high schools. Massachusetts, for example, has established an engineering curriculum that requires all students to take a full-year course in technology and engineering. Most students, says Ms. Katehi, "don't know what engineering is about. They don't understand that it plays a role in advancing society or solving our critical problems."

And many of those students who are familiar with engineering "think of it as a nerd's profession," says Pradeep K. Khosla, head of the department of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

In an effort to change such perceptions, Purdue's new department will help teachers develop curricula to introduce K-12 students to engineering through hands-on activities in the laboratory and in their own communities, by building playground equipment or ramps for wheelchair users, for example. It will also put undergraduates majoring in engineering into high-school classrooms to serve as role models for girls and minority students.

Purdue plans to offer master's and doctoral degrees in engineering education and a certification program in the subject for high-school teachers. The hope is that they will become ambassadors for engineering, enticing more students into the profession.

That's what happened with David M. Mullaly, a junior majoring in chemical engineering at Purdue who credits a high-school teacher for fostering his interest in engineering. The school offered no engineering courses, but a physics teacher with engineering expertise "kept mentioning engineering, saying it was the way to go," Mr. Mullaly says. "So I just kind of listened to him."

Many colleges are running summer camps to pique younger students' interest in engineering. At Purdue, female students conduct engineering camps for sixth- through eighth-grade girls. Carnegie Mellon offers a summer camp in robotics on its West Coast campus, near Palo Alto, Calif.

Kathleen P. Illk, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering at Purdue, says a similar camp inspired her to study engineering.

She came home from space camp in Kansas, she recalls, "declaring that I wanted to design rockets or the next space shuttle."

Ms. Illk has since shifted her focus to biomedical engineering, in which she hopes to "use my education to help others."

Overcoming Job Loss

An increase in the outsourcing of jobs in engineering fields to India and China has also made it harder to recruit students, Purdue's Mr. Haghighi says. Students are afraid that jobs won't be there when they graduate.

"There is a lot of scare in the air," he says. "Engineering societies and professions talk about it quite a bit."

To better prepare its students to compete, Purdue is broadening its curriculum, with plans to offer a new, multidisciplinary program through its department of engineering education. New courses in the program would teach students the management skills needed to fill the higher-level jobs that are seen as less vulnerable to outsourcing.

"We need to create engineering leaders for the 21st century," says Ms. Katehi. "That's how we're going to stay competitive."

A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences concurs. It describes the engineers of 2020 as "broad-based technology leaders" who also understand policy and the global economy. "There will be an increasing number of opportunities for engineers to exercise their potential as leaders, not only in business but also in the nonprofit and governmental sectors," it says.

Joseph F. Janas, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering at Purdue who aspires to be a corporate CEO, says he sees management as a more secure option because "a lot of those jobs are still held in the U.S."

Other engineering schools are preparing students for careers in the burgeoning field of homeland security. Faculty members at Carnegie Mellon, which offers both undergraduate and graduate courses in the field, conduct monthlong seminars on cybersecurity for their colleagues at minority-serving institutions. Participants then go back to their campuses and establish cybersecurity programs of their own.

Fewer Foreign Students

For many engineering programs, the need to attract American students has taken on greater urgency as the number of foreign applicants has dwindled.

At Purdue, which educates more foreign students than any other public university, applications to undergraduate engineering programs have fallen by 35 percent since 2002, to 665 from 1,018, as of mid-June. Michael A. Brzezinski, director of Purdue's international-student office, attributes the drop to changes in the visa-application process and to increasing competition from other countries, including Australia and Britain. "There are students who are looking at other destinations," he says.

Purdue's Ms. Katehi cites the growth of engineering programs abroad, noting that China has been particularly aggressive in "growing its own engineering institutions." In response, Purdue has called upon its network of international alumni to promote its engineering programs abroad and has sent faculty members on recruiting trips to Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Central and South America. It has also pushed back the date by which international students must commit to enroll, to give the State Department more time to process their visas.

The University of Florida has seen an even sharper decline in foreign applicants. Its department of electrical engineering and computer science saw applications from China, India, and South Korea drop by 37 percent, 57 percent, and 45 percent, respectively, from 2003 to 2004, says Pramod P. Khargonekar, dean of the College of Engineering.

"The word is out in the student community abroad that it's hard to get visas," he says. "A lot of people have been turned down, and a lot of people haven't been able to come back here. Clearly it's having an impact."

At Purdue, the impact of the recent trends has left an empty space where four buildings once stood. The university demolished the buildings this spring to make room for a $46-million engineering center that will house the new department of engineering education. Although university officials know the disappointing national statistics by heart, everybody from the dean to the freshmen hopes that the new building signals a rebirth of engineering.

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