A 1959 Comment on Engineering Education

[NNadir]

“Among the young engineers we interview we find few who have received thorough training in engineering fundamentals or principles, but most have absorbed quantities of facts — much easier to learn than principles but of little use without application of principles. Once a principle has been acquired it becomes a part of one and is never lost. It can be applied to novel problems and does not become obsolete as do all facts in a changing society. American education in general emphasizes learning factual know-how at the cost of absorbing fundamental principles, just as it stresses conditioning of behavior at the cost of developing the ability to think independently. Most of our schools have lost sight of the fact that a well-trained mind can cope with many unforeseen problems. Instead, they try to foresee every possible future difficulty a young person may encounter and then give a special course in how to deal with it. This is a hopeless endeavor, for in a rapidly changing world no one can foresee what future problems will have to be met...”

Hyman Rickover, Education and Freedom, 1959

It's possible we do better now, on the other hand, the engineers of the 1960's through the year say, 1990, did remarkable things.

[RussellCattle]

1. I compare this to modern college education, both in the Arts and Sciences, that teach the facts of core.....

….subjects and require fewer and fewer electives from different fields. They turn out too many graduates who don’t know how to think critically outside of their box. Do colleges and universities even offer a “Liberal Arts” degree these days? They were rare enough back in the sixties when I went to school, when counselors would tell you it was “worthless” degree with no hope of employment.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. After 100 years in existence, my alma mater relinquished Liberal Arts

for STEM and "Leadership" agendas. Instead of various eras of music history, various levels of harmony and counterpoint, analysis of symphonies, and composition, there is no music major per se, just a few elective courses where you fiddle around with electronic keyboards.

All studies of modern and ancient languages are gone. No study of the Enlightenment and history or economics or government. Gone.

[RussellCattle]

8. Thanks for the response and update. Not surprised but still disheartened. Years ago I took 240 credit.....

…….hours to get bachelor’s degree that only required 180 hours, because I wanted, as a 29 year old, to get a well rounded, “liberal” education. Of course that was a state university with $200 per quarter tuition.

[oldfart73]

3. Some people wind up in careers unrelated to their field of study.

Some people wind up in careers unrelated to their field of study.
Employers look at that stick-to-it attitude and accomplishment of that goal of a college degree.
Others bloom earlier than that degree. See Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Poor guys had to settle for honorary degrees rather than 'earning' one.

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https://truthout.org/articles/texas-gop-declares-no-more-teaching-of-critical-thinking-skills-in-texas-public-schools/

Texas GOP Declares: “No More Teaching of ‘Critical Thinking Skills’ in Texas Public Schools“

(I think they eventually reversed course on this one.)

[oldfart73]

4. OOPs! Duplicate. Sorry.

[MichMan]

5. No college degree? No problem. More companies are eliminating requirements to attract the workers they need

A growing number of companies, including many in tech, are dropping the requirement for a bachelor’s degree for many middle-skill and even higher-skill roles, according to a recent study from Harvard Business Review and Emsi Burning Glass, a leading labor market data company. More than 51 million jobs posted between 2017 and 2020 were analyzed for the study.

This reverses the so-called “degree inflation” trend that picked up steam after the Great Recession where many employers began adding degree requirements to job descriptions that hadn’t previously needed them — even though the actual jobs hadn’t changed.

In place of four-year-degree requirements, many companies are instead focusing on skills-based hiring to widen the talent pool.

Even the U.S. government is rethinking its approach. In January 2021, the White House announced limits on the use of educational requirements when hiring for IT positions. Looking predominately at college degrees “excludes capable candidates and undermines labor market efficiencies,” the executive order states.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/companies-eliminate-college-degree-requirement-to-draw-needed-workers.html

[Chainfire]

6. Colleges should teach people how to think, self discipline, express their thoughts, organize, and work with others.

You learn that you can't party all night, and be effective the next day. Everything else can be learned on the job. Of course, I do want my Doctor to be well versed in anatomy, but that is a vocational study.

My wife has a master's degree in a field that she never worked in, it was not a waste of time. A degree shows that you had the guts to complete a four year long initiation and that you are probably a good risk for employment and with a little luck you can be trained to do your job. The additional value of learning such life enhancing subjects as art history or music can add to a pleasurable life.

Of course, college is not and should not be a vocational education program, but for many, that aspect of it is why they are willing to pony up long-term debt and delay entering into the world of income.

Colleges and Universities do a good job of teaching life skills until the Fascist come in to control the leadership and curriculum as DeSanits and his gang of Nazi bastards have been doing in Florida.

[hunter]

7. My dad's best friend and my wife's uncle were not academically inclined in high school...

... but they liked to tinker with machines. My wife's uncle was a car guy. His first job out of high school was working in a body shop. My dad's best friend was a car and television guy.

As young men they were hired by major corporations to maintain and repair machines. While they were working they were able to pursue their college educations. With the encouragement of their employers they had engineering masters degrees by the time they were forty. Whatever abstract facts they learned in the classroom became "application of principles" in a very natural way. In some sense their hands already knew these principles and their minds just needed a way to express them.

Is that even possible today? I remember as a kid noticing how my dad's best friend was always working or studying and he didn't have a lot of time for his family. His wife carried the entire burden of household chores and taking care of the children, especially in comparison to our family where my dad was always available to us when he got home from work and on weekends and holidays. My dad had graduated from college before he met my mom. He got his masters degree later, about the time me and my siblings could reliably get ourselves off to school in the morning and do most of the household chores.

I started college as an engineering major in the 'seventies, possibly to please my grandfather who was an aerospace engineer who hadn't really understood why his son, my dad, would choose to study art in college.

I didn't ever feel comfortable as an engineering student so I changed my major to biology at the end of my second year, greatly disappointing my grandfather since I was his only grandchild who seemed inclined to carry that legacy.

Rickover doesn't mention the greatest failure of engineering education in the 'fifties, which was it's hostility towards women. In the 'seventies this hostility was still overt. Engineering classes were mostly men. My first serious girlfriend was an engineer. She survived that grinder by being a tough girl. I'm not sure that kind of experience makes anyone a better person.

[Igel]

9. Still true.

Facts are easy to memorize. My HS students like to be able to take numbers and plug them into equations.

Ask them to work more abstractly, just with pure math, and they balk.

Ask them to explain why those equations work, what principles are involved is a problem--which goes back to doing things with pure math, because if you don't understand what's underlying the model you're trying to build you don't know how to build the model. What's underlying the model? Basic principles.

College Board/AP makes a big deal out of them. AP teachers make a big deal out of them. But high-schoolers at the "concrete-operational" stage when they're 16, 17, 18 ... They miss the point.

[NNadir]

10. I certainly missed the point in high school.

Although I was generally a good student, I recall not recognizing that the Sciences were basically exercises in applied mathematics. Further, I thought of mathematics as a pure abstraction. I don't know whether to criticize my teachers for not driving the point home or to blame myself for an immature brain. The latter case, if true, may extend to other young people. Maybe they grow out of it. I did, albeit slowly.

My parents has very low level formal educations and certainly couldn't have helped. They knew next to nothing about science and math.