A VISION FOR CHANGE IN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING AND ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION

Why there’s a need for change

Fundamentally unchanged since 1955, our current, highly-standardized engineering education system was created to prepare graduates for a world of predictable jobs, stable careers, and homogeneous cultures.

It’s a mindset that can lead to:

  1. A weed-out mentality that excludes vast proportions of our society at a time when the need for engineering talent and diversity of thought is more critical than ever.
  2. A focus on introductory courses in mathematics and science, especially calculus, is the foundation of all engineering and is viewed as a proxy for engineering student talent.
  3. An emphasis on technical competency and monetary profits, rather than human impacts and social good.
  4. An education system that is inflexible and uninspiring to many segments of our diverse population.
  5. Systemic barriers that hinder us from achieving our full potential as a profession.
  6. A reliance on professors who lecture at their students, despite extensive scholarship on the merits of student-centered, active learning pedagogies.


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We are at a crossroads in engineering education. We can either continue to incrementally improve a system handed to us by our past or design a new system that addresses the challenges we face now and tomorrow.

It’s time for a sea change in engineering education

Our goal is to transform today’s engineering education into a system that produces self-directed, lifelong learners who can collaborate, solve problems, and communicate in an array of contexts and with people from varied backgrounds and life experiences.

 

The new Engineering Mindset Report and movement

The Mindset Report is the result of a multi-year effort to develop key recommendations for changing the landscape of engineering and engineering technology education to better meet the needs of our ever-changing world.

The report evaluates the current state of engineering education and curricula in terms of diversity, inclusivity, pathways, and mindset and identifies the most challenging issues and limitations of our current system.

The resulting findings and recommendations are clustered around six main themes:

  1. Create flexible program structures to remove barriers
  2. Evidence-based pedagogy: Creating a student-centered engineering education
  3. An accessible and diverse engineering education learning environment
  4. Preparing campuses for a student-centered engineering education
  5. Leveraging strategic partnerships
  6. Engineering a new mindset for engineering education

Our goal is to take our findings and recommendations to develop a roadmap for an inclusive, flexible, humanized, and multipath engineering curriculum that better equips engineers for an unpredictable—and successful—future.

> DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-2212721.
Any opinions, findings, interpretations, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of its authors and do not represent the views of the National Academy of Engineering, American Society for Engineering Education, or National Science Foundation.

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