The Future of Engineering Education: An Interview with Rick Miller

Abstract

An Interview with Rick MillerRick Miller talks with James Euchner about the state of undergraduate engineering education and what we need to do to attract and motivate the engineers of the future.Rick Miller with Jim EuchnerRick Miller is the founding President of Olin College, which seeks to redefine undergraduate engineering education and attract more students to the profession. In this interview, he discusses the challenges engineering faces and some of the ways universities can engage students in a broader mission, as well as approaches schools can use to train engineers in the 21st-century skills innovators will require.JIM EUCHNER [JE]: You have spent a career in higher educa- tion-as a professor, administrator, and innovator. What is the state of engineering education in the United States?RICK MILLER [RM]: I have a persistent, almost unshakeable concern about undergraduate engineering education. We lose so many students! In the US, only about four and a half percent of the bachelor's degrees that we offer nationally go to students who study any kind of engineering. And about half of the freshmen or first-year students who enter engi- neering anywhere in the country won't ever graduate engi- neering. We have a very leaky pipeline.In addition, we are ignoring half the population. Only about 18 percent of the bachelor's degrees in engineering go to women, which is very unbalanced. Medicine and business and law all do much better than that, so something needs to change. These two things-the leaky pipeline and the lack of women in engineering-were my concerns when the Olin Foundation reached out to me, and that's how I wound up resigning from tenured employment at the University of Iowa, where things were going very well, and pulling my family back to Massachusetts to work at a school that didn't yet exist. When I arrived on campus, back in February of 1999, Olin College was not yet a place; it was only an idea.JE: What were the underlying causes of your concerns?RM: At the core of the problem was the fact that engineering students were not very engaged in their education. We in academia were teaching a lot by rote learning. Most of the courses had to do with analysis and calculus, with the un- spoken assumption that more math is always better: it doesn't really matter what the problem is-if you use more advanced math it means you're a better engineer. We didn't spend much time teaching students to formulate problems, but we spent a lot of time teaching solutions that were highly technical and specialized. Even the textbooks are organized in chapters defined by analytic techniques: this is the solu- tion for problems in two dimensions; this is the solution for problems in three dimensions; this is the solution for prob- lems with cylindrical coordinates, and this is the solution for problems with rectangular coordinates.This approach is way too formulaic, and it doesn't draw students into engineering. Their mindset when they walk into the classroom reflects this. They want to know, number one, Is this going to be on the test?, and number two, Which chapter is this from, and what formulas apply? And that's pretty much what engineering education was, not just at one school but at every school.Now imagine that you want to prepare people to be in- novators, to be creative and to develop new ideas. This ap- proach to teaching would be the most effective barrier that you could imagine. And it is our norm.It seemed natural to me that we have to do better. Why have people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and other innova- tors, dropped out? Why are there so many creative people at our large universities who are not interested in engineering? Why? Engineering does not present itself as being creative; it presents itself as being technical. It presents itself as being all about applied mathematics and applied science. We have to do better.Even my own PhD-and I think I got a good education- was really about applied science. …