Engineering a Better Education

In my Structural Engineering class, my professor raised the issue of whether or not Engineering should be exclusively a doctorate degree, making it similar to the current Medical degree program. As an undergraduate engineer I may be biased, but I believe this would be a mistake.

The logic for making such a transformation would be to improve the quality of engineering education and the reputation of the discipline. By having an exclusive doctorate degree program, engineers could more easily focus in depth on their chosen field and theoretically develop a more comprehensive understanding of engineering principles. In addition, requiring extended education and developing a more selective enrollment process would add a lot of punch to the degree improving the reputation of the profession similar to the high regard with which doctors are held.

I believe this strategy costs the field the ability to educate larger numbers of young students on the principles of engineering and does not add significantly the engineer’s abilities. Engineering is fundamental to every aspect of civilized life and therefore a constant output of new engineers is required. Increasing the amount of education and time required to get into the field may discourage some from joining the field despite an ideal increase in reputation.  Furthermore, I view the core of engineering to be not in depth knowledge of your particular field, but an ability to solve problems in a logical, deliberate way and to adapt to different scenarios.  Any graduated engineer will tell you that they only utilize about 10% of what they learned in school.  That 10% is the ability to look at a problem, see all of the possible factors, and to methodically solve it. I believe the mastery of the specifics of a field of engineering cannot be achieved through school because of the wide range of fields and incredible amount of detail that each goes into. Instead the specifics must be learned in the field.

For these reasons more in-depth education will not have much impact on an engineers understanding aside from limiting their ability to solve problems outside of their focus.  By no means is the engineering education program perfect, but I believe its current state is better than limiting it to a doctoral degree program.