A Blueprint for Engineering Education in the 21st Century

It is an established fact that the overall welfare of any society directly depends upon the level of contribution and productivity of each of its members. In modern times, however, it has also beco.me clear that the engineering know-how of a society further amplifies the productivity of its other members trough innovation and technology. Therefore, contributions of engineers are, the backbone of an economy in today's complex world. However, in a closed loop system in which technological advancements trigger complexities of life in social patterns which, in turn, requires technological tools to cope with them, we find that a graduate engineer's period of active participation in the professional life keeps shrinking. There are a few in the profession who, by genius and innovation, keep advancing the frontiers of technology while the majority left behind, find it difficult to cope with. At the same time over the last couple of decades, we have witnessed that technological revolutions in information processing, computing, communications and AI [Artificial Intelligence] have turned geo-political boundaries in to lines in the sand. As educators, the challenges we face now are not only the initial education at the Bachelor's degree level, in a given geopolitical confine, but also to design an education system for life-long productivity of engineers within a global framework. Since engineering is application of scientific knowledge to solve societies' real-life problems, hands-on education and training is essential in this profession. Though in this respect it parallels the medical and legal profession, the education system of engineers does not come close to the education system of doctors and lawyers. This paper, using a systems approach, presents life-long engineering education as a multi-loop control system with the student engineer as the "plant" and the four institutions as the controllers and feedback elements, as portrayed in the block diagram [Fig. 3]. These four institutions being: The Government, The Professional Society, The University and, The Industry. After introduction, a set of roles and responsibilities of these institutions are developed based on this model. A scenario, seven years from now, of engineering education system based on this approach is described.