The future of engineering

A June 11th article in the New York Times on "Fewer Journalists Seeking Fellowships" ends with the following quote by the head of the Knight Science Fellowships at MIT: "I feel a little queasy encouraging young people into journalism. It's such a precarious industry right now." Well, I feel the same way about engineering sometimes; I doubt many of the incoming freshmen at Lehigh who are about to enter the College of Engineering have any clue what they are getting themselves into. I suspect they will end up very pleased with their choice... especially when they realize large numbers of engineering graduates before them did not take jobs as engineers but instead were hired as consultants - as a result many graduates are paid much higher salaries than they would have dreamt of as freshmen. In my own limited experience in industrial engineering at Lehigh, the better half of the students goes to work for consulting firms, the lower half goes to work for manufacturing companies. (This post of mine emphasizes my point.)

The truth is, many engineers-by-training in the US have become sophisticated number-crunchers in charge of extracting meaning from large amounts of data, and that suits the services industry just well. But isn't it a waste of time and resources, then, at least for the professors, to train students on materials strength and bridge resistance if the kids all migrate towards information management when they get their degree? (No, I am not bitter; I teach quantitative management models heavily used in the consulting business.) When you think of the traditional division of economy in three sectors - agriculture, manufacturing and services - you cannot help but wonder whether farmers around 1950 felt as engineers feel today: an endangered species. Maybe my view is a bit distorted by the nature of my department, which straddles manufacturing and services - and manufacturing in the US doesn't have much of a future - but it seems that when the brightest kids of the department don't go into consulting they go into finance (New York City's siren song...) and engineering might well run the risk of becoming a profession for also-rans. At MIT many PhD holders in science and engineering have ended up as "quants" on Wall Street, again thanks to their analytical skills. (See here for more information on that.)  Many people have written on the future of engineering by now - an excellent article on the topic is due to Rosalind Williams ("Education for the Profession Formerly Known as Engineering," Chronicle of Higher Education, 2003); she points out that "Fewer faculty members in engineering actually make things; more work with symbols and models" and that "Engineering (...) has developed its own theoretical wing, with practitioners who never actually build things and whose research takes them well beyond the range of common-sense experience."

University administrators (former MIT president Charles Vest, who will become the NAE's president next month, and Shirley Ann Jackson are the most famous examples) worry about the competition waged by foreign universities as education goes global. But are they waging a rearguard battle, will the US become a services-land where most of the real engineering is outsourced to countries that value science more, and where the so-called engineers are number-crunching problem-solvers who stare at computers all day long? Or will the pendulum swing back in the engineers' favor after a Sputnik-like incident that will bring engineering back into the list of national priorities?