Successful Civil Engineering Education

Abstract

A success of a given profession can be measured by its prestige, the social position of its members, by the relative size of their salaries, and by its attractiveness for the best and brightest students. In this context, civil engineering is not very successful. However, this situation can be improved if the civil engineering education is seriously reconsidered and reformulated with the ultimate goal to make it much more successful. In this paper, a new educational paradigm is proposed, which is based mostly on the theory of successful intelligence, recently proposed in cognitive psychology by Sternberg 1985, 1996, 1997a . This paradigm is called “Successful Civil Engineering Education,” and its implementation should ultimately make our civil engineering profession more successful. In the past, civil engineers were leaders of our civilization as the creators of its built environment. They were uniquely qualified to design and build novel bridges, tunnels, water-filtration systems, etc. Their role significantly increased during the Industrial Revolution and through the Second World War. Today, however, civil engineers are seen as followers, mostly implementing ideas developed by others Arciszewski 2006; Galloway 2008 . They are qualified and competent, but primarily to do routine and analytical work. During the last century something changed in the nature of civil engineering. This change has led to the present stagnation of ideas, and in turn to the reduced prestige of civil engineers. We are living in a rapidly evolving world that poses intellectual challenges such as ever-growing environmental and safety regulations, homeland security, and global warming. These challenges, which arise outside the purview of long-established civil engineering practice, cannot be met using only the well-known, routine solutions that arise from traditional engineering analysis and optimization. Rather, they demand the development of novel, nonroutine solutions. They simply demand engineering creativity. U.S. civil engineering companies are involved in a fierce competition for market share—indeed for survival—with competitors from many countries that offer a significant labor cost advantage. Changing the course of U.S. civil engineering to emphasize creative problem solving would create a novelty-driven competitive advantage. In addition, novel engineering solutions that directly address the specific challenges of a project can often produce significant cost savings. Today, globalization of routine civil engineering work is an objective trend driven by costs, by the high quality of the traditional civil engineering education in many developing countries, and by progress in information technology that has made out-