We must begin to think...

"Science is Hard" and Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-19T17:16:00.003-06:00

There was an article in the New York Times last week that was forwarded to me by several people. The article's title is "Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)". My first impression was "this is news?". My second thought was "I've seen this before" and finally remembered that this theme was in The Onion about nine years ago (link here).

But sarcasm and parody aside, the article first made the point that science and engineering are hard and then went on to discuss the potential of more effective and engaging methods of teaching. Why is this considered news when the point at first glance seems obvious. But then I sat back and thought a little, and realized that the fact STEM education needs reform both is and isn't news to most people. And this contradiction or confusion is perfectly understandable if you consider not just what makes the news, but how the news is generated.

For years an underlying assumption of this country has been our technological, scientific, and moral superiority. This assumption drives our foundational narratives, and contribute to our cultural identity. In an era of where the corporate news media is required to turn out stories rapidly and continuously, it is my perception that the media increasingly bases stories on these foundational narratives. Given the rapid news cycle, there is less time to reflect on and challenge these narratives and thus they are often reinforced among the great majority of the American populace that are not experts in a given discipline. Since cultural narratives likely play a major role in identity, challenging these narratives opens one to disbelief and criticism, much of which can be irrational.

If one looks at the Times article there are two other related foundational narratives that crop up in the first two paragraphs: that the US is falling behind other countries, and the "Sputnik Moment" story. These narratives are, of course, related.

The "falling behind" narrative is used to underscore or highlight news and relate it to basic human fears. The fear that the end is near, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the other, and the fear of death. In this narrative there is an "other" out there that is gaining on us, and if it catches or surpasses us we can expect the future to be worse than the present. All our hard work will have gone for naught. In the last fifty years this "other" was first the USSR, then Japan, and now is China/India.

The "Sputnik Moment" is our story of how we overcome this threat. A pivotal event somehow transforms the country. A cadre of scientific heroes rise up from the mass of ordinary Americans and through their superior intellect transform society and save us from the "other".

Both these foundational narratives are not new, and form the basis for human storytelling throughout much of history. But the stereotypes and resultant actions triggered by these narratives can be dangerous if the narratives go unchallenged precisely because they are so deeply rooted in what it means to be human. Two questions immediately come to mind. First, is the "other" really a threat? Second, are there really "heroes" among us that can rise up and save us? The first question is one that is often asked; I don't really have anything to add to this discussion. The interesting and most important question, I feel, is the second one...

The importance of the question of whether we can have "heroes", which I believe today are called "entrepreneurs" or "innovators", struck me today when I was down at Occupy DC today with my son and saw this sign:

"I always wondered why somebody didn't do something about that.

Then I realized, I AM SOMEBODY"

The foundational narrative of a Sputnik moment is that critical events result in heroes rising up. Such moments create heroes. But we live in a society that suppresses Sputnik moments since they both threaten our narrative of superiority and result in changes to the status quo. Engineering educators would love to see the engineer as hero again, but this will not happen. If we wait for heroes we must wait a long time. We live in an age of cooperative ventures, teams, large systems, and complex problems. Sputnik created this age, and we must live with its consequences. And as the protest sign above indicates, we must now all be heroes.

The foundational narrative of the scientist hero sparked the wide-spread belief that science (and by incorrect association engineering) is hard, the domain of a few "super-brains". Phrases like "It's not rocket science" for what is perceived to be simple imply that rocket science is hard, it is not accessible to everyone. How much damage has this narrative done to our country?

And perhaps this is the hidden message in the Times article. Students seek to construct their own narratives where they are heroes or heroines. As we seek to make engineering rigorous, we deconstruct their narratives; they can no longer maintain the myth we ourselves have created for them. So they leave. And the myth perpetuates...

Tolkienesque thoughts on the Internet

2011-09-04T21:45:00.003-05:00

I have been reading a long, but quite interesting article by Jason Lanier, who has been involved for years in the development of the internet, but whom I had never heard of previously. While being critical of the internet, the article is not a diatribe or "rant" but rather a well-reasoned article that sees the advantages and disadvantages of global networks in general. In his article, "Local-Global Flip", Lanier makes myriad points--peppered liberally with examples-- two of which are, I believe, critical to understand the highly networked world we have found ourselves in after one short generation, as well as provide guideposts to the evolving world of engineering education.

The first of these points is that those of us who use the internet are not consumers, rather we are the product. This is particularly true if we take advantage of "free" software and services. This is rather obvious; as Heinlein said so long ago (and it was old then) TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"). It costs money, real money, to buy and maintain the servers and associated technology, and pay the smart people to develop all this cool stuff. Google (and other internet companies) make money on this by collecting, analyzing, and selling information about you. Since I am writing this blog on Blogspot, I too am participating in this model!

The second point Lanier makes is that there are unforeseen and unintended consequences to any technology we choose to adopt. The term used in intelligence and policy circles for unforeseen consequences is "blowback". The theme of unforeseen consequences has long resonated with me personally; perhaps from reading Tolkien at a young age:

"Alas for Saruman! It was his downfall as I now perceive. Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves." (The Two Towers, ch. 11)

Engineers (and by association technologists) suffer from Saruman's sin of hubris. The hubris of the "network" is that none of us fully understand it, and few even understand it in enough detail to recreate it. And that is just the technology, the social and economic consequences are even less known or perhaps even knowable. As an example Cindy Atman's (and colleagues') work on what engineering students learn found that knowledge of the larger context surrounding the engineering students learn is nearly absent when they graduate.

These two points are related. The consequences of the internet and the data-enabled networks engendered by it have, in Lanier's opinion, impoverished the populations they were designed to serve. We create knowledge and give it away for free in exchange for social recognition while those who control the network gain wealth and power. Lanier sees this as the "local-global" flip; as networks get too global they create local conditions that undermine their own success. Lanier points out that this flip is the likely, but not inevitable, consequence of creating large networks which simply arise from the fact that those that accumulate power have the failing of being human.

But enough summary, I can't do this article justice in a blog post. What, you may ask, does this have to do with engineering education? If Lanier's conclusions are right it means we need to be very careful with new conceptions of universities that focus on putting more content on-line. By making information widely available, we eventually undermine the role of faculty since we have always been knowledge workers. The focus on research, on knowledge creation, does help define a valuable role for faculty, but does not address education. It is too bad Lanier's article doesn't focus on his third way, the "middle path" between the extremes he defines of Marxism and "The Matrix" for we surely need to find better way forward.

Putting our collective heads in the cloud

2011-08-26T12:31:00.000-05:00

About a month ago I read an interesting opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled How to Save the Traditional University, From the Inside Out by Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring. Any article that threatens to save us from ourselves should be viewed with caution, or as Thoreau so wisely said: "If I know for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life...for fear that I should get some of his good done to me..." However some of the advice in this article seems quite apropos to the current climate in which universities find themselves.

The article points out that universities still have a valuable role to play in society in conducting basic research, to "serve as conservators and promulgators of our cultural memories", and to allow mentoring for the rising generation. While I personally object to the term mentor, given that the actual role of Mentor was to put the brakes on Telemachus, all these are valuable roles that the university plays in society. However they caution about many of the same issues I am so passionate about in this blog- the increasing social injustice that comes with the cost of higher education. But beyond bitching about the problem, they have made some very reasonable suggestions to address it.

The most important, I believe defining, point of the article is that these issues have to be addressed inside the academy. This is absolutely true! The pressures on higher education are external, but these pressures are being felt across all aspects of society and, as the title of this blog alludes to, we are very short short of money so we must begin to think our way out of the mess we find ourselves in. The article makes several reasonable suggestions that outline a path forwards:

Intelligently combine distance or asynchronous learning opportunities engendered by technology with face-to-face interaction and mentoring.
Focus on each institutions strengths and be willing to cut programs and classes that don't contribute to that strength including low-enrollment graduate classes.
Focus on enabling students to graduate in four years.

Or as the article succinctly states the university needs to clearly identify "the students it serves, the subjects it offers, and the scholarship it performs."

These are all great ideas, but I don't think the authors go far enough. It is not enough for a university to simply cut back to self-identified strengths. It also needs to partner with other schools (that don't have the luxury of multi-billion dollar endowments like Harvard) to offer a complete range of services. Think of this if you will like a "cloud" model of higher education. One of the images I present when I give talks is shown below:

Pretty much every faculty member in the audience gets this right away. My next question to the audience is more subtle: "What sat on the shelf next to every one of these computers?". I get a variety of answers, but a correct one that makes my point is "a shelf full of floppy disks". The point is that in the dawn of the computer age, say fifteen years ago, you had to have a physical copy of every piece of software you wanted to run and every piece of data you wished to analyze. Now of course much of this resides elsewhere, in "the cloud".

This cloud model is a good one for universities, particularly given the current financial straits we will likely be in for a long time. Does every university need every engineering department, what about a business school, or a registrar. Consuming services to maintain a broad spectrum of educational opportunities makes a lot of economic sense, particularly given that this model would allow a university to market its strengths to others and both monetize its services and gain status.

I owe, I owe, its off to work I go...Is College Worth It?

2011-05-17T12:20:00.000-05:00

I saw a link to the College Loan Debt Clock which in turn led me to the New York Times article linked in this post's title. It seems that for the first time in (recent?) history in this country the total debt that individuals accumulate to go to college has exceeded credit card debt. According to data from the Times article, credit card debt rose from $600 billion in 2000 and topped out at nearly $1 trillion about 2008 and has since fallen to just over $800 billion. Student loan debt on the other hand was less than $200 billion in 2000, and has risen steadily to over $800 billion today, a jump of more than a factor of four in one decade. To provide another perspective not the the Times article, the total US mortgage debt roughly doubled from $6.5 trillion to over $14 trillion over this time period.

This trend is very clearly shown in the just released report from the Pew Research Center "Is College Worth It?". This very informative report seeks to provide data on the costs of college from two polar perspectives- the American public and college presidents. The report is a wealth of information on the actual costs of college and the public perception of same.

Interestingly the ratio between the earnings of young people with college educations and those without peaked in the early 1990's and has stayed flat since the early 1990's...

...while the inflation adjusted (to CPI) costs of college are climbing steadily.

It seems that this trend is not sustainable broadly although looking at this data on a very large national scale likely hides other trends for particular majors or employment categories. It is not surprising given these trends that college debt is increasing.

The Pew report spends a good deal of time looking at the question of debt. It is clear from data in the report that the costs of college track almost linearly with the total debt owed for college. The New York Times article quotes several economists who classify both home mortgages and student loans as "good debt" and credit card debt as "bad debt" since both homes and a college education have long term value. However as the two figures above seem to indicate, that while this is true now, if costs keep rising and the wage differential stays flat this will eventually be an historical assumption and not reflect reality. In fact as the Pew report hints at, this is already the reality for large sections of our society that are traditionally under-served by higher education. The three top reasons for not attending college are, at their root, all financial.

The Pew report also tracks a steady downward trend of the public's belief that college is affordable or a good value for the money. College presidents, on the other hand, tend to be more optimistic about college, but 57% say that most people can't afford college. A surprisingly large percentage of college presidents believe that the US higher education system is not the world's best or heading in the right direction. Interestingly the more selective the college, the more the belief that it is affordable and the US higher education system is the world's best. I guess, on reflection this isn't so surprising since we all tend to see things from our local perspectives and why should presidents of elite colleges not be biased by the view from their offices? Although the differences between selective and non-selective institutions are not huge, this is a worrisome data point since it is the more elite schools that tend to drive change in higher education.

The Pew report does break down earnings by degree using a "synthetic work -life earning estimate" by which they mean how much a degree holder earns if future wage trends mirror historical data. The figure below shows lifetime earnings of bachelor (or higher) degree holders in millions of dollars.

Engineers do well, even compared to science and medicine. The report splits engineering BS degree holder from MS degree holders and finds a lifetime earnings of $1.7M for the BS degree recipients and $2.1M for MS degree holders, showing the extra investment in an engineering master's degree is well worthwhile, at least for the population at large. To compare the low person on the totem pole, education, the lifetime earning differential between a high school diploma holder and a Bachelors in education is only $80,000! Clearly major matters.

More on popping bubbles

2011-04-22T13:50:00.000-05:00

Two articles caught my attention in the last week. One, published in the highly respected journal Nature is a criticism of the current system of education at the PhD level. The second article is on the TechCrunch web site and looks at entrepreneur Peter Thiel who sees a rapidly inflating bubble in higher education.

Both articles have at their core the worry that we all share about the economy and our childrens' prospects of future prosperity. Both articles also share the point of view that education in not a panacea for society's woes, as is often assumed by policy makers.

The Nature opinion piece draws its conclusions from a study published in the same issue that looks at the prospects of PhD graduates in several countries around the world. The basic conclusion of this study that there are wide variations in the prospects of PhD students depending on the economic growth of the country, but in most cases there are not and will not be enough academic jobs. The author of opinion piece, Mark Taylor, paints the picture as more of a social justice issue with universities and faculty complicit in continuing a system of indentured servitude for doctoral students despite the slim prospects of getting a job. This isn't a new conclusion. I got my own Ph.D. around the time of the big downturn in Ph.D. employment in the early 1990's and the internal joke among Rice graduate students played off of the recruiting slogan of the Army at that time: "It's not just a job, it's and indenture".

Regardless of whether you agree with the opinions stated in Dr. Tayor's article or not, it seems clear that the increased supply of doctoral degrees helped along by universities needing to grow programs, in combination with the decreased demand for PhD scientists and engineers mimics the conditions of an economic bubble.

The other article comments on activities of billionaire Peter Thiel who very much believes the entire higher education system is in the midst of a bubble similar to the internet bubble of ten years ago. The article points out the current rethinking of the value--i.e. benefit to cost ratio--of higher education: "...the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia."

One of the interesting points made by Mr. Thiel is given in this quote (emphasis mine):

If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates? It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.

He hits the nail right on the head in my opinion with the comment on status. Universities seek status the way moths seek candle flames and redneck junkies seek methamphetamine. The massive recent investment in higher education is, in many ways, funding status increases for institutions. There are definitely positive benefits from this investment, but in many cases the investments are only moderately successful because they are driven by the wrong reasons (institutional status).

Peter Thiel is seeking to attract twenty undergraduate students away from degree completion by offering them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start their own business. Obviously this is a publicity ploy to demonstrate his point, but as the article points out, we aren't really serious yet about education. Perhaps some high profile attempts to poke holes in the myths and mystery surrounding academia will be healthy for the nation.

A cool new tool, thanks to Google

2011-01-29T09:51:00.000-06:00

I saw a link to a new tool Google published with very little fanfare a month ago. This tool allows word counts of over 5.2 million books stretching back centuries. The tool returns graphs of the fraction of how often in a given year the word that you search for is found in scanned Google books. Obviously the results returned are going to be dependent on the types of books Google scanned and how accurate the database is, but with millions of books scanned, one can assume it is a good sampling. There is a more complete report of how the tool works in a very recent article in Science. However without going into great depth there are several very interesting (and fun) questions that this tool can provide insight on quickly and easily.

For example we in engineering education are rightly focused on the importance of our discipline. How does the rest of the English speaking, book publishing world perceive engineering in a historical context? It is easy to search for the word "engineer" and compare our importance to several other professions.


Figure 1: Relative frequency of selected professions for two centuries

Several interesting trends jump out from this data. Engineer is in the literature database more than scientist, which is somewhat surprising given our perception of engineering as being less visible than science at the K-12 levels and in parents' minds. Also both "engineer" and "scientist" have declined recently compared to the two other professions of "doctor" and "lawyer". Note that the words "mathematician" and "technician" are barely on the map. Is this decline an artifact of the dataset? It is simple enough to run a search for very common words:

Figure 2: Relative frequency of very common words

While there have been slight declines in some words,they don't correlate temporally well with the decline of "engineer" or "scientist".

Going back to Figure 1, there are some interesting bumps in the frequency of the word "engineer" that don't appear in scientist. Historically these seem to correspond to major military conflicts (Civil War, WW I, WW II). The figure below highlights this by comparing "engineer" to two other militaristic words: "soldier" and "pilot". There is definitely a stronger spike for the more militaristic words, but clearly the data shows the relationship of engineers to military conflicts.

Figure 3: Correlation of "engineer" with military conflicts

Interestingly enough in the recent "War on Terror" period post 2000, there has not been a connection with engineers, at least in the books scanned by Google.

Is the decline of the word engineer associated with all the most common disciplines of engineering, or just a few? The figure below shows the results of a search for "_____ engineer" over the last century where the blank is the particular discipline shown.

Figure 4: Frequency of five different disciplines of engineering

A search for "_____ engineering" turns up very similar results. It is interesting that all branches of engineering show a decline, and all but industrial engineering peaked in the late 1980's, about the time the number of engineering students in the US peaked according to NSF's Science & Engineering Statistics data. It is also interesting to note the correlation, or lack there-of, of different disciplines and military conflicts.

The last meaningful search I did in NGrams was for STEM education, in particular comparing "engineering education" with "science education" over the last century. This is shown below.

Figure 5: Comparison of two types of STEM education

To me it interesting to see the meteoric rise of "science education" about the time you would expect following the Second World War. Perhaps the decline had to do with the political and social movements near the end of the Vietnam War? Although interestingly enough while "science education" is written about much more, "engineering education" has been on a steady decline since about 1980, when "science education" started its largest period of growth.

Are these just numerical coincidences, does the set of books from which this data is drawn accurately reflect public interest, knowledge, or perception? I neither have the scholarly background nor time time to delve into this issue in a truly scientific manner. However I do believe that this data qualitatively reflects trends in public perception and attention. If this is true, and that is a big "if", then engineering seems to be on a long downward slide. This data suggests the critical importance of explaining what we do, publicizing our impact, and attempting to become more visible. The National Academy of Engineering's Changing the Conversation initiative is a good first step.

An Engineering Culture

2010-12-06T19:34:00.000-06:00

There was an article in the New York Times recently that summarized the comments made by several industry leaders here in the US and in Great Britain recently about these countries turn away from manufacturing. An interesting piece in the Times' article is the emphasis on an "engineering culture" and how this lack affects the economy and society. James Dyson's recent report to the British government, Ingenious Britain, highlights the need for government to sponsor and fund large engineering projects both to stimulate excitement in engineering and technology and create the jobs that turn interest into careers. The Times' article states:

"For decades, France has nurtured big engineering endeavors, like nuclear power and high-speed trains. The graduates of France’s leading engineering schools are among the elite of French society."

Other calls for more of an engineering culture have been put forward on this side of the Atlantic by Andy Grove of Intel (covered in a previous post) and Jeffery Immelt of GE who said candidly:

"Many bought into the idea that America could go from a technology-based, export-oriented powerhouse to a services-led, consumption base economy – and somehow still expect to prosper. That idea was flat wrong. And what did we get in the bargain? We’ve seen a great vanishing of wealth. Our competitive edge has slipped away, and this has hit the middle class hard."

Unspoken in these reports is the criticism that the engineering profession--especially those that profess to be engineering educators--was somehow complicit in letting this happen. I believe this to be true. As long as we focus on content, as long as we discuss equations, principles, and concepts we are safe. Safe from straying into the messy and subjective realms of economics and politics and religion. Safe from those that profess belief that is not backed up by fact or reason. This course of non-involvement is, in some ways, prudent. The rise of demagoguery and concurrent demise of reasoned discourse is unsettling to many engineers. The decision to stay well away from the polemics of politics is a safe course and for many faculty part of an unstated code of ethics.

But yet... The engineering profession does have its own set of beliefs as the above public statements by engineering leaders indicates. While these beliefs are by no means monolithic across the profession they do exist. Outsiders may wonder about our unwillingness to stand up and fight for these beliefs, or to pass them on to our students. These actions become understandable when one realizes that the engineering profession's unwillingness to articulate, inculcate, and defend our beliefs are, in fact, part of the beliefs of our discipline.

I don't really understand the origins of this attitude, but it may arise from the simple fact that over time we become what we do. Most engineers' work is driven by data and numbers; we learn to dismiss statements not backed up by data. We are reinforced in this behavior by the difficulty of what we do; embracing a data-driven life, like Thomas Merton's asceticism, requires year of discipline to pay off. But there are things in the world that cannot yet be quantified, and perhaps never can be. Does our focus on data make us less able to accept, embrace, defend, or articulate such ephemeral things as values? I am reminded of James Branch Cabell's character Jurgen who upon seeing a vision of Helen of Troy understood that his life experiences had made him incapable of expressing passion:

"At the bottom of my heart, I no longer desire perfection. For we who are taxpayers as well as immortal souls must live by politic evasions and formulae and catchwords that fret away our lives as moths waste a garment; we fall insensibly to common-sense as to a drug; and it dulls and kills whatever in us is rebellious and fine and unreasonable; as so you will find no man of my years with whom living is not a mechanism which gnaws away time unprompted. For within this hour I have become again a creature of use and wont; I am the lackey of prudence and half-measure; and I have put my dreams upon an allowance."

Engineers need to be careful not to let our values go unremarked or under-appreciated. We need to more explicitly teach our beliefs and our way of looking at life. If there was ever a time in history to stand up for faith in reason, for using data to make decisions, for balancing human need with the hard facts of the universe that time is now.

Are they lazy or just bored?

2010-08-15T20:36:00.001-05:00

Two academics associated with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, recently came out with a report that examined several data sets and found declines in study times over an approximately forty year span of time. The data, which seems to have undergone a rigorous analysis, indicates students are studying less now and devoting more time to leisure. The article and the write-up about it in many ways support the observations and beliefs of many faculty members who deal with students on a day-to-day basis.

The report's power is magnified by the fact that it is well written, short enough to actually finish, and sprinkled with memorable quotes such as:

“A nonaggression pact exists between many faculty members and students: Because the former believe that they must spend most of their time doing research and the latter often prefer to pass their time having fun, a mutual nonaggression pact occurs with each side agreeing not to impinge on the other.”

As such the report, as the authors subtly acknowledge, will join the growing body of literature that directly or indirectly excoriates higher education by presenting evidence of standards declines, over-catering to students, failures of self-regulation and accreditation, and the need to reform higher education along the lines of business ventures. In some ways both we faculty and the students deserve such criticism.

The comfort afforded from this report is the kind found when data backs up one's personal beliefs or observations. Many faculty will see in the report a reflection of their own conviction that students don't work as hard, that they are different and becoming harder to teach. And it is true that students have changed, but everything changes, and changes ceaselessly. What the report tries, but ultimately fails, to answer is why the significant reduction in number of hours studied is occurring.

The authors, who are economists, try some explanatory analysis which reflects their upbringing in the culture, beliefs, and assumptions of economics. A seeming assumption that is made is that students always act in their best economic interests. A surprising statistic from the report is that study time makes a rather large difference in salary later in life:

"We find that postcollege wages are positively correlated with study time in college. The increase in wages associated with studying is small in the early postcollege years, but it grows over time, becoming large and statistically significant in the later years. By 2004, one standard deviation in hours studied in 1981 is associated with a wage gain of 8.8 percent."

But what if students don't act in their own (and society's) best economic interest, what if instead they act in their best personal interests?

To try to understand this issue a little bit better, and delve into the issue of why economic and personal interests may not be the same, I took the authors up on their offer in the article to provide more data on request. For the most recent data the authors provided the moments of the distribution:

Mean: 19.75373
Std. Dev.: 14.5910
Skewness: 1.334962
Kurtosis: 5.697429

If I plug these into Matlab [using the pearsrnd command for the geeks out there] and make a histogram of a random distribution of 10,000 students with these numbers, this is what I get...

The red line is the average hours studied (19.75) while the green line is the hours a student is expected to study if they were taking 15 student credit hours (SCH) and worked 2-3 (average 2.5) hours outside of class for each hour spent in class. Since I'm an engineer, the visual of the figure really brings home the fact that most students simply don't study as much as we expect. The question is, why?

There are some interesting quotes from the article [which I acknowledge are taken out of context] that may support the viewpoint that students are not motivated to study...

"By contrast, students in 2006 in the University of California system spent 11.4 hours per week playing on their computers “for fun”—a category of leisure that would not have existed in 1961."

Or this...

"In the past, then, some students may have worked hard to signal they were high-ability types, relative to the other students in their college. But if students within a given college are now of similar ability, grades or rankings may now lack content as a signal."

The latter quote comes from the authors' putting forth an explanation which is based on students using grades to make themselves look good for employers. Basically the argument goes that since there are fewer ability differences between students within the same college, students no longer need to distinguish themselves from peers by working hard to get good grades.

All of these are possible explanations... However, lets go back and look at the quote on wage gains v.s. study time. The data says--assuming that the standard deviation of 14.6 hours per week is about the same in 1981--that if you study 14 hours more a week, you can expect to make 8.8% more later in life. I think for many students studying twice as long for more salary 25 years later is not seen as a wise investment. Perhaps students value personal time more than potential future wage gains? Perhaps they are different than their parents in that they have less faith that working hard today for unquantifiable future gains is a wise investment of their time? Perhaps they have lost faith that the economic system will treat them fairly, or perhaps there are simply too many interesting things to do now.

The fact students can create an identity they are valued for by doing activities besides working hard in school (James Gee has documented that playing video games is such an activity) is likely the biggest factor. Economic arguments are valuable, but don't seem to capture the breadth of human behavior and motivation. If the structure of universities doesn't change to acknowledge the need to build identity, then expect this worrisome trend to continue...

Scaling, not innovation

2010-07-22T20:39:00.001-05:00

There was in interesting editorial in the business magazine Bloomberg by the founder of Intel, Andy Grove, on job creation. In the editorial he shares his belief that for job creation the current focus on innovation and start-up companies, which we have wholeheartedly adopted in engineering education, needs to be matched by a stronger focus on "scaling". In the editorial he defines scaling as "what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands."

Grove's article is about job creation, and the negative impact outsourcing has had on American companies ability to scale. In the article he proposes a simple metric to measure job creation, the "employment effectiveness" which is the investment made up to a company's initial public offering (IPO) and divide that by the number of employees ten years later. For start-ups like Intel and National Semiconductor back in the '80's this figure was around $2K to $10K. Today, due to outsourcing and difficulty in scaling, Grove asserts it is more like $100K.

What does this mean for engineering education? That we should all run out and write grants to develop programs to teach engineering students about scaling? No, that will be learned after school. Rather that in my opinion one of the most critical problems we face in engineering education is that of scaling, not innovation. How do we scale the innovations in learning we have already developed? How do we measure, in a simple and transparent way, the efficiency of scaling innovations to many degree programs? What in our "business climate" hinder scaling? What is our "educational efficiency" calculated in terms of investment in educational development costs to the number of students affected ten years later?

In his editorial Andy Grove went out on a limb to recommend what might be considered drastic measures to recover job growth in this country:

The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars -- fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability -- and stability -- we may have taken for granted.

Our problem, and likely the solution, may be similar. Build an educational commons through financial incentives. Encourage transparency in university finances and demand that some significant fraction of indirect costs be placed in this commons coffer, not for one university, but for all universities. Colleges that wish to adopt, i.e. to scale, educational innovations by adopting proven techniques can tap into this fund. Innovate on what an education commons will look like and how it can level the playing field not just between universities, but between all those involved in the educational endeavor.. Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, has some brilliant ideas on this subject.

Days after I posted this, PayScale.com released a table of college's return on investment which they got by mining salary data. I have no idea how accurate this data is, but it is interesting to look think about in terms of other investments.

Skating away on the thin ice of a new day...

2010-06-26T07:24:00.007-05:00

One of the topics that is near and dear to my heart (at least right now) is reform of higher education. Counting my own time doing time in college, I have spent nearly thirty years in higher education and have seen many sides of the university- from small private institutions to large public schools, and from being a hard core research faculty member to being an educator. Struggling to succeed in these roles has convinced me that while universities do some things well they, like many other institutions in our society, have lost their soul somewhere along the way. We have become too focused on serving our own self-interests. But it is easy to throw pop bottle from the bleachers; if you want to change the status quo it helps to come to the battle with a competing idea. In a decade of working on program reform in higher education, I've come to believe that it isn't the students, instructors, or content, rather the fundamental structure of universities needs to change.

As a life-long, but not particularly avid, gamer I, like some others, have come to believe the future of the university will be built on role-playing games. In fact a lot of this blog reflects this theme and I've done a few YouTube videos trying to garner support for this idea. The other day I came across a fascinating talk on TED that added some mind-blowing numbers to the ones I've already collected:

Active online gamers spend 10,000 hours of play by the time they are 21 (almost as much as the time spent in school). Note that ten thousand hours is the time estimated to master new skills and the time spent in school from 5th to 12th grade.
There are 500 million active online gamers worldwide (that will grow to 1.5 billion in the next 10 years). The Pew Charitable Trust sponsored a study looking at the age distribution of gamers.
In the game World of Warcraft a total of 5.93 million man-years has been invested by players around the globe.
3 billion hours a week are spent playing online games

The really amazing statistic is the last one. I guess it isn't that surprising given the number of gamers, but three billion man-hours is a lot of hours. I started wondering what other endeavors reached the billion man-hour mark, and what immediately came to mind was man landing on the moon. A little internet research turned up this from a NASA site:

"To realize the goal of Apollo under the strict time constraints mandated by the president, personnel had to be mobilized. This took two forms. First, by 1966 the agency's civil service rolls had grown to 36,000 people from the 10,000 employed at NASA in 1960. Additionally, NASA's leaders made an early decision that they would have to rely upon outside researchers and technicians to complete Apollo, and contractor employees working on the program increased by a factor of 10, from 36,500 in 1960 to 376,700 in 1965. Private industry, research institutions, and universities, therefore, provided the majority of personnel working on Apollo."

Let's estimate how many man-hours it took to put a person on the moon by making a couple of assumptions:

Assume NASA spent 13 years, from 1960 to 1972, working on Apollo.
Lets say everyone on the program worked 261 days a year (weekends off but no vacation) for eight hours per day.
The number of personnel stays constant over the 13 years at the 1965 number from the quote above- about 377,000.

If I multiply all these numbers together estimate of the total man-hours to put a man on the moon several times is about ten billion man-hours. The time, in terms of man-hours, it took to put a man on the moon is spent on on-line gaming in less than one month. I know this argument is somewhat flawed. A lot of gamers are young people without the training of engineers, technicians and scientists; big projects require funding and infrastructure; project management is a huge problem; etc... But still, the sheer time spent gaming is stunning.

Most people, particularly academics, would consider this a waste of time. As a gamer, I don't. We've created alternative worlds that are more fun, and at some level rewarding, to play in than our real world. It is not surprising many of our best minds, most creative students, seek reward through play since the motivations to game are the same motivations to create. This is not a problem of individuals, but is a problem of society and rewards for effort. A problem that needs to be solved both by individuals, by institutions, and by policy. And in all the discussion of policy the word "fun" is rarely heard.

Here is a challenge for engineering educators... Imagine a education system where your courses and programs weren't required, where there wasn't the carrot and stick of grades to goad students. How in this system would you fill your classes, motivate your students, and engage their long term interest?

Four Short Commentaries on Recent News

2010-03-23T12:42:00.001-05:00

There were four separate but related items in the news recently that seem to highlight the thin ice higher education finds itself crossing these days.

1) Students Protest Increasing Costs : This is a link from the national news which caught my attention the other day. It seems students and faculty are protesting the decrease in funding to higher education that states are having to impose as they tighten budget. While I feel for the students, years of self-indulgence and frivolous spending by universities aren't going to be undone by student protests; the change has to come from within faculty and administration. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation analogous to healthcare, the costs have gone up so much we can't serve those who so desperately need education to get ahead in the world.

2) Ohio State Heads Down the Right Path: President Gordon Gee, who I've lauded in earlier posts, supports two parallel faculty pathways to achieve tenure- one for research and one for teaching. I've always thought that faculty members who are both excellent researchers and excellent teachers are rare and becoming rarer. Having followed both paths myself there are inevitable sacrifices if one tries to be excellent in both of these disparate endeavors. If not professionally, then certainly personally. Almost every study that has looked at the correlation between research and teaching finds there isn't one. Go Gee!

3) Gates Foundation Supporting Transformational Change (alternate link): The Gates Foundation, a relatively long-term supporter of changes to higher education, is looking more at the breaks in the secondary school to college pipeline, and rewarding schools who have the cojones to challenge the status quo. I hope that throwing its considerable financial weight behind reform will stimulate schools to actually change their culture, but I am afraid it will simply stimulate university's money-hungry lizard brain without affecting the centers of reason, wisdom, and morality.

4) John Hopkins crosses the $40,000 Tuition Barrier: It seems that Johns Hopkins is the twelfth school to charge $40,000 tuition annually. Consider, according to Wikipedia, that the median household income in the US was $50,233 in 2007, and that persons with doctoral degrees in the United States had an average income of roughly $81,400. In Maryland (where Johns Hopkins is located) the median household income is $70,545, however.

Is the higher education bubble about to burst?

2010-02-17T13:52:00.003-06:00

Let me start off by saying that I am asking questions rather than stating facts or opinions in this post. On October 9th of last year I wondered about how sustainable our current system of higher education was and concluded that we (higher education) may be in for an unpleasant surprise in the next decade. I recently gave a talk at my school's Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence (link to talk here) where I brought these questions up among faculty and stimulated some lively discussion. So today's post is devoted to expressing concerns and asking questions.

An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the result of a study that shows the public is becoming less tolerant of the increasing costs of college. In the last decade the percentage of people who believe college is necessary for success has gone up 24% (from 31% to 55%) while the percentage of those who feel that college is affordable for most qualified students has dropped 26% (from 54% to 28%). A second article from Inside Higher Ed also reports on the finding and contains a quote from Richard Vedder about college: "The bubble’s got to burst on this thing.... The staying power of colleges is amazing..."

I generally don't pay much attention to economics, and admit my (profound) ignorance of this field. As an engineer my world is much more certain; tied more to physical reality and less to perceptions of value. But to a non-economist, several trends appear if you look at data comparing the cost of five separate items from 1978 to now as shown in the figure below. (Click figure to see it full size)

In my simplistic interpretation this figure says that if you had invested $100,000 in the Down Jones Industrial Average in 1978 your wealth world have peaked at $1,800,000 before the economic crisis and be about $1,200,000 today. Your $100,000 home would have peaked at around $500,00 and be worth $400,000. However $100,000 worth of "stuff" in 1978 would cost you $300,000 today unless that "stuff" was medical care or college. A $100,000 hospital stay in 1978 would cost about $600,000 today while the $100,000 bill for sending four kids to college in 1978 would be over $900,000 today! So hey, if you had invested in the stock market (ignoring mandatory fees and taxes) you would be on Easy Street. Of course most of us don't have the good fortune to get a big windfall to make a one time investment.

Now lets be engineers at look at not only the values, but the slopes of the lines. Medical care and "stuff" have been going up at a pretty constant rate for 30+ years. Houses have too, until around 2004 when the slope of the line increased- this was the housing bubble. If you extrapolate the slope you'll see that house prices are about where they should be if the slope had been constant. The DJIA, on the other hand, has been much more prone to fluctuations in slope. However each increase in the slope (bubble) is followed by a correction. The cost of college also followed a pretty straight line until around 2003, when the slope increased. Is this a permanent change in the slope, or does it indicate the inflationary phase of a bubble? And what does a "college bubble" look like, does this term even have meaning?

One point to make is that what we are plotting here are fundamentally different things. A home is a physical object that has value both from how desirable it is when you want to sell it, but also its ability to provide shelter. A home has characteristics of both "want" and "need". "Stuff" also includes both wants and needs. Both houses and stuff have actual value. Medical care probably falls into the need category for most people and since you are buying a professional's services, it too has actual value as a service. Stock prices, on the other hand, reflect peoples' perceptions of many factors; mainly their faith in the future performance of a company and the economy as a whole. It isn't really a want or a need. Nor does it have actual value, it has perceived value. College, in my opinion, falls in a grey area between perceived value and actual value. You actually buy some goods and services for the four or five years you're in college which have actual value. Education does provide better opportunities, but only to the extent that a college degree is perceived to have value. If people did not perceive the value of college degrees, they would lose much of their value. On the want-need scale, college seems to be moving more towards the need side in the public's perception. Tying all of this together, it appears to me that things which rely on perception of value are more prone to rapid increases followed by deflationary bubbles. Look at the change over 30 years in the DJIA and "stuff". Things that people need likely sustain their value longer than things they simply want, particularly during hard time.

College, in the grey area between actual need and perceived need is thus more prone to price fluctuations than homes, but less so than stock prices. If these observations are correct, and I freely admit this is speculation, then if the perceived value of college decreases, one would expect a rapid drop in costs with commensurate pain for higher education. So, as pointed out in the Inside Higher Ed article, the survey contains both good and bad news. Good in that college is increasingly perceived as a need rather than a want, but bad in that we are unable to control costs and the public perception of college as a filthy venal house of slimy pandering reptiles is increasing. So will the need of college continue to allow us to drive prices higher, or will the public's increasingly negative perception and a weak economy lead to alternatives to a degree that will pop the bubble? It is probably good to remember that in every bubble people convinced themselves that they could pay inflated prices because the value of their investment would never go down. It may not take that much to change peoples' perceptions and pop the bubble (if it exists).

So what does all this mean?

First, universities need to begin to plan for what happens if this hypothetical bubble pops. If the perception changes, then a college degree loses much of its value and we're going to have to pay the piper for years of living beyond our means.
Second, engineering educators should work for social justice within our own institutions. We are pricing a larger fraction of our own citizens out of any real chance to make it in the world, and in my opinion this situation is intolerable.
Third, we need to consider what the public's perception will be if the bubble bursts, and the college degree they have paid so much for loses its perceived value. Are we the next Wall Street? Will we see signs like that below posted on our quadrangles?

Grades, grade inflation, and the myths associated with them

2010-02-05T16:48:00.001-06:00

An article in the New York Times caught my eye the other day. It turns out that in the flaccid economy Princeton students are resenting their university's attempt to control grade inflation. About five or six years ago Princeton had 40% of grades be an "A" of some type. To try to rein in grades, they implemented a policy that (quoting from the NYT article): "Over time and across all academic departments, no more than 35 percent of grades in undergraduate courses would be A-plus, A or A-minus."

I must admit that I am somewhat of a radical when it comes to grades. I personally believe that if you stand back and take a long look at college education, grades hurt learning. There are several reasons for this belief, but they generally stem from just how inaccurate and insufficient a number like GPA is for classifying academic preparation. The NYT article has some interesting quotes that seem to support this opinion. For example:

"Historically, students in the natural sciences were graded far more rigorously, for example, than their classmates in the humanities, a gap that has narrowed but that still exists."

While at first glance this isn't that surprising, if one judges academic preparation or "rigor" solely by GPA and you assumed (incorrectly) GPA depends causally on academic ability, then students in the natural sciences are less academically prepared than students in the humanities. Of course this isn't true, there is a wide distribution of students in both disciplines. It is just variations in grading standards and practices by the different cultures.

Here is another line from the NYT article, this time a quote from a student in support of Princeton's measure to prevent grade inflation:

“What people don’t realize is that grades at different schools always have different meanings, and people at Goldman Sachs or the Marshall Scholarship have tons of experience assessing different G.P.A.’s”

Really? I have a really hard time predicting student performance in my own classes based on incoming GPA, and I probably know more about my program than 90% of the faculty in the department. While there have been a lot of studies showing GPA is correlated to various measures of academic performance, the truth is educational institutions can't, by accreditation agency dictate, use GPA or grades as a measure of student learning. While GPA is likely a good general measure of students' potential to thrive in an organization, I believe that employers would welcome more fine-grained measures provided they were given the tools to interpret them.

Another student quote, from a person opposing Princeton's policy, points out another danger of using grades as an overall measure of learning:

“People intuitively take a G.P.A. to be a representation of your academic ability and act accordingly. The assumption that a recruiter who is screening applications is going to treat a Princeton student differently based on a letter is naïve.”

One of the biggest problems of using a GPA as a de facto measure of students' ability is that then GPA becomes a measure of students' ability. If we (i.e. insitutions of higher learning) promote a number that others' use to measure "student ability" that we ourselves can't use to measure learning, we are guilty of hypocrisy at the very least. It is time for the engineering education community to begin to think about alternatives to traditional grades, alternatives that better describe our students's multi-faceted abilities.

Perspectives on Globalization from Panama

2010-01-10T16:05:00.000-06:00

I just returned home for the first time in fifteen years. Home, for me, is the Republic of Panama where I grew up in the now defunct Canal Zone. Work, kids, and finances had kept me from returning along with the vague fear that the home that I remembered would have changed beyond recognition. It hadn't.

While much had changed, much remains the same. Some places I remembered were gone, new places had appeared. Perhaps one of the biggest surprises was how much energy and commerce there was in the country. On an old Air Force base Panama built the biggest mall I have ever been it, and right next to it a gigantic terminal for buses. People from all over Panama and other parts of Central America shop at the mall and bring their purchases home on the bus. My wife, Karen, and I took air conditioned buses nearly to the Costa Rica border, a seven hour trip, for $12.60 each. The Panama Canal is being expanded, a huge container shipping port has been built, and the pristine and vacant beaches of my youth are dotted with forty story condo towers. Panama City is thriving, visitors and retirees are welcomed, and cell phones and internet bring changes to a centuries old culture.

We read about globalization, and as engineering educators think narrowly in terms of numbers of students, competition for jobs, H1B visas, and changing curricula. But this view is deceiving and limiting. Globalization also means that many corners of the globe are becoming more livable for those used to the amenities typically associated with "Western" Civilization. Globalization means that the number of problems that can be addressed by modern technologies (with its reliance on modern infrastructure) is growing dramatically. Globalization means that we need to look beyond our own borders for solutions to our problems, because they may have been solved by others before us. The "missionary zeal" we feel to bring the supposed advantages of Western cultures to the rest of the world is exposed as hubris.

Our students need international experiences, not, as often assumed in the talks I have attended, to give engineering expertise to the Third World, but to realize that the distinctions between First and Third Worlds are vanishing. Travel is not to play Prometheus and bring technology to the primitives, but to take ideas and energy and perspective from places where life moves faster and runs deeper.

Are we the next Wall Street? Thoughts on University 2.0

2009-10-09T17:04:00.003-05:00

Two weeks from now our program will go through its hexennial, uh, sextennial...every six years, ABET visit. As my teaching has evolved further from lecture/homework/test it becomes harder and harder to fit in with others' expectations for providing course artifacts. Since I manage ABET data collection and evaluation for our program the last six months have been hectic, stressful, and resulted in some deep personal reflection on the university, its role in society, and its near-term future.

And this reflection has resulted in some chilling realizations. I've commented in previous posts on reports from the Delta Foundation showing that the cost of education is not benefiting students, faculty battles with university administration over support, and the dramatic increase in new building that are occurring on my campus. The other night, in the middle of sending out yet another round of reminders to faculty to pull their nose out of their research for the five minutes it would take to turn in ABET data that higher education may be the next Wall Street. There is no-one more hated right now than Wall Street; that reviled house of filthy, venal, slimy, pandering reptiles whose unbridled greed wrecked the economy and may still wreck the country.

The rising cost of higher education effectively extracts more and more money from American families. But rather than providing a better education, universities spend it on themselves. Increasingly colleges turn their backs on our historic mission of educating tomorrow's engineers. Faculty are rewarded for research. Clearly some research has palpable benefits for society as a whole, but the effort and time required to do good research effectively detracts from the education of undergraduates. The current economic crisis is stimulating discussion of whether a college degree is worth the expense and whether community colleges actually offer better value.

Like many others these reflections on how the internet and changes to society have impacted universities led me to the conclusion that while we're in trouble, it is possible to redesign higher education for the next century. If you're interested in some concrete ideas click on the video link below...

Boldly going forward cause we can't find reverse!

2009-09-07T16:20:00.006-05:00

I've been rolled under, savaged, and spit out in pieces by the start of school again. As H. L. Mencken said "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats." So perhaps it isn't that surprising that the items that have caught my eye as I have skimmed through engineering education literature have had to do with broad scale reform of the entire educational enterprise.

The first article was from High Ed Morning and looked at the top ways students cheat. The article is very unscientific, but does look at the cheating modalities enabled by that newest fashion accessory, the cell phone. The article discusses how Simon Fraser University gives a new F grade for cheating (we have the same here at OSU) but concludes with the statement "Will a different kind of failing grade matter to students? Or do we need another solution?"

The Chronical of Higher Education in an article titled "The Canon of College Majors Persists Amid Calls for Change" looks at calls for radical changes to college curricula. This article focuses on changes in the content of majors and ways to more rapidly introduce new content into traditional disciplines. While several current efforts are briefly discussed, the Chronicle's take on reform is that the traditional system of curricula and departments won't change any time soon although majors are constantly updating themselves. I personally find the viewpoint taken by the Chronicle somewhat limited in that the article retains the assumption of a traditional degree program when discussing radical change.

The last article is from the website Fastcompany and focuses on "education 2.0 architects". Despite the trendy internet lingo phrasing and annoying ads on the site, it is a good article that summarizes briefly many of the challenges facing the higher education system in the 21st century. One of the better discussions is that "the edupunks are on the march..." highlighting the fact that lots of technological education is cropping up completely outside the college mainstream.

The article surveys some of the new ventures that are strategizing on how to begin "the endgame" for traditional universities. The include Flat World Knowledge and Peer2Peer University. One of the more interesting discussions is about Western Governors University where the program is assessment rather than course focused and faculty really do serve as mentors rather than lecturers. The article concludes by saying "The transformation of education may happen faster than we realize. However futuristic it may seem, what we're living through is an echo of the university's earliest history. Universitas doesn't mean campus, or class, or a particular body of knowledge; it means the guild, the group of people united in scholarship... Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions."

I agree. It is time for traditional institutions to begin to be nervous about the barbarians at the gates. Not because the barbarians are unmotivated, entitled, and materialistic kids who will sack the dignity of the institution, but because the barbarians may simply bypass the halls of academia. As the barbarians go so do the roads, trade, innovation, and development.

Note- a few days after I published this post an article in the New York Times points out that colleges are failing in the core mission.

Slow Education

2009-07-24T11:14:00.018-05:00

Perhaps because I am an Aquarius born in the Year of the Dragon I tend to take on too much and am thus intrigued by the burgeoning "slow" movements as a way to make the social and cultural changes needed to implement a more sustainable society. Last night I read a "Slow Business Manifesto" proposing a set of principles for business to slow down, consider the needs of its employees, and work for something greater than profit. Perhaps view is naive, but as the manifest eloquently stated: "The only reason businesses that don't create their own products or provide their services with love survive, is by being cheaper".

Perhaps some of the tenets of the various slow movements could apply to how we educate our students. Perhaps the greatest authority on "Slowness" (other than the post office and my university's bureaucracy) is the World Institute of Slowness and their related site, Slow Planet. These organization have already published some thoughts on Slow Education; as the Aelius Donatus is reported to have said “pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt”- a plague on those who have proclaimed our bright ideas before us. The site links to a short video that provides a wonderful anecdote about Slow Education:

So what would Slow Education look like, what are principles one could use to frame a discussion of slowing down how we educate future engineers? Here is a start on a manifesto:

The teacher matters. Teaching does, and should, express your beliefs. For students to learn they need to learn both the material and also the values and attitudes of the teacher. Share yourself and develop relationships with your students. Be human.
Teaching changes you, for better or for worse. I see many colleagues that are bored with what they teach because they focus on covering content rather than making teaching a creative expression. If you are bored with your teaching you will become boring.
Teach what you love. Research has shown that the instructors attitude has a disproportionate effect on learning.
Content doesn't matter that much. Learning is about experience, not information. Since it is impossible to fully prepare even the best student for the range of careers available don't try to. Create meaningful experiences rather than grind through a list of required topics.
Acknowledge the full meaning of "life long learning", a phrase that is bandied about far too casually by people who should know better. Life-long learning means that people are expected to continue to learn throughout their lives and that this learning will occur at a pace and a direction that varies as much as individuals. If we accept that people really are life-long learners, we need to re-examine our educational system.

Slow Education is also defined by what it is not:

It is not a return to "the fundamentals". Knowledge, particularly technical knowledge is constantly changing and education needs to follow change closely.
It is not abandoning standards, rather re-examining standards and considering the human dimension or learning. Slow Education measures distance traveled, not how quickly one arrives at an arbitrary destination.
It is not a call for a cadre of professional engineering educators. Rather we need to recognize the time, cost, and challenge of educating new generations of engineers and reward those who choose to follow this calling.
It is not a refuge for poor teachers, demagogues, crack-pots, or curmudgeons. There are standards by which learning can be measured and methods that are more or less effective for achieving given learning goals. Slow Education simply recognizes that achieving goals is a reflective and iterative process.

Anyone have any other ideas on what a movement for Slow Education in engineering might look like?

The end of the world as we know it...

2009-06-29T09:51:00.009-05:00

Lately I've been engaged in one of my least favorite past-times, political in-fighting. My university, firmly situated in BFE Oklahoma, has not yet felt the financial pressure many East Coast and West Coast universities are feeling. We tend to lag the nation and have been somewhat cushioned by increases in state revenue due to high energy prices. We're not immune though, and worry over next year's budget is palpable. The response of some administrators to budget pressures has been to require faculty to charge academic year salary on grants to help offset costs. As you might imagine there is push-back from faculty, especially since NSF has changed their salary policy to limit total grant-derived salary to two months per year.

While I am not directly involved in the budget process--a privilege/responsibility jealously guarded by administrators--it is not much of a stretch to see the money going to support costs of the new research buildings going up all over campus. There was a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which a panel from the Association of American Universities, an organization that represents top research universities, asked the National Academies to study whether the country needs fewer, but better, research universities.

This is an interesting question. On one hand it is logical to have doubts about the purity of the motives of a panel selected by an exclusive club. "You need to be spending more money on research, but don't waste your money on 'those' people. Your money would be much better spent at the 'right' schools... really, you can trust us!" My knee-jerk response is the one that ends with "...and the horse you rode in on.". The Stanford scandal showed what happens when university administration sees research as a source of unrestricted funding. On the other hand my (admittedly limited) experience as a graduate school at a research university and faculty member at a research "wanna-be" has driven home that there are deep cultural differences between institutions. Top research schools have a culture that supports the Herculean trial that is good research. While research is possible at other schools it is simply more difficult. As my favorite proverb states- "It is not just the mountain ahead, but the grain of sand in your shoe that wears you down". A thornier issue is that if large, second tier schools make the substantial investment in research facilities, as my university has chosen to do, it is likely that there are resources that are not flowing to student learning (discussed in a previous post).

Really it seems that the question comes down to culture. I don't buy the argument that just because a university has been successful in the past at research they should be on the "short list" for more research funding. I've sat on enough proposal review panels to know that the system already favors research schools. But I'm also experiencing first-hand the stumblings of a university trying to create the "cultural shift" required to rise in the ranks of research schools. What lessons can be drawn from schools that are efficient or effective at research (rather than simply do a lot of research)? How does one change a culture, and what is a realistic time constant for the change? What are the signs that a school is even open to cultural change? Without asking these questions--and doing the research necessary to answer them--the question of whether the US can afford the current number of research schools is simply throwing gasoline on the ego-pyre that is research.

Designing Engineers

2009-05-31T10:34:00.009-05:00

I've been on the road a lot this month. First an NSF proposal review panel then a meeting of the EE departments that were awarded NSF Department Level Reform grants. After a short visit home it was off to an NSF Engineering Research Center site visit and I'm writing this just before a workshop in Baltimore at the CLEO conference on lasers. While I would love to be able to get a lot of work done from the road, I am never very efficient while I'm traveling so I tend to take books or articles instead. The type of reading that falls in the important but not urgent category, reading I don't get done in the office. By reading I both kill the tedious hours of air travel and assuage the Protestant guilt that comes with idleness.

On this trip I am reading Louis Bucciarelli's excellent book "Designing Engineers". I chose this book since my attempt to carve out a niche for myself in engineering education requires identifying a set of important problems; understanding the creative act of design overlaps my interest and experience. This book is blowing me away!

Through examples at three companies the book provides insights on the engineering design process and clearly illustrates how design is as much social as it is technical. The process of negotiation is shown as key to design as is how engineers represent themselves to their peers and managers. I debated requiring the book in my capstone design course, but on reflection realized that most engineering seniors probably don't have the base of experience to really draw insights from the book yet.

It has actually been nearly a month since I started this post, but got hung up in politics and getting ready for the ASEE conference. This weekend I ran into one of my former students at the wedding of another student and she was interested in teaching a course on success in engineering careers. So maybe I can incorporate this book in a way to help students succeed in their careers...

Intermission

2009-05-11T20:30:00.006-05:00

It is funny how one little piece of information can give you a new perspective on something you have known for years. For some reason I found myself looking up the meaning of the word "bismillah" the other day. Thank you Google. Did you know that two of the inmates in Guantanamo are named Bismillah?

This one little fact changed forever the way I listen to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. I know Freddy Mercury sang this long before the "War on Terror" but it still seems to presage modern events surprisingly well:

I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the Fandango
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me
(Galileo) Galileo (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Galileo Figaro
Magnifico-o-o-o
I'm just a poor boy nobody loves me
He's just a poor boy from a poor family
Sparing his life from this monstrosity
This awful travesty
Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go
Let him go
Bismillah! No We will not let you go
Let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go
Let me go (Will not let you go)
Let me go (Will not let you go (Never, never, never, never))
Let me go, o, o, o, o
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
(Oh mama mia, mama mia) Mama Mia, let me go
Beelzebub has the devil put aside for me, for me, for me

After I published this two days ago I accidentally stumbled across the definitive Bohemian Rhapsody site...

Oh Joy! ABET time again!

2009-05-03T13:37:00.006-05:00

It has been a hectic month with many deadlines and trips rearing their head in May like the weeds in my neglected lawn. One of the activities that has been eating my lunch is preparing the ABET report which is due sometime this summer.

As with all organizational reviews, reports are called for; the ABET report is a doozy. And like all reports on whose outcome rests money, power, or prestige, there are a few kernels of truth hidden behind a lot of smoke and mirrors. As I've gained more experience with such report writing over my career I've come to recognize that in writing such reports the smoke and mirrors insidiously over time slip into the minds of those who read and write such reports as truth, no matter how far from truth the report was originally.

Since most of the writing is falling to one or two people with reviews and edits by others we needed a way to label the information for veracity so we don't come to believe our own, uh, "creative interpretation" of our program. So I developed the series of "veracity levels" below modeled after the government's much-mocked terror alert levels.

The "Mathematics Problem"

2009-03-30T09:42:00.006-05:00

Our journal club for this semester is looking at the "mathematics problem" in engineering education. At least this is what we've been calling it, but this may be due to our own ability to define what "mathematics problem" really means. The idea arose from listening to faculty complain that students don't seem to know math, or at least seem unable to do the mathematics asked of them in engineering classes. Over here in engineering we tend to blame either the math faculty or--even more easily--the students' high school preparation. But this viewpoint has always seemed a little simplistic to me; i.e. it is somebody else's fault.

In looking at this issue, there is a surprising dearth of information on the connection between engineering and mathematics, considering how fundamental math is to engineering. Wendy, a doctoral candidate in the journal club, found a paper in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (vol 54, p, 197, 2008) that looks at whether what students learn in mathematics courses transfers to chemistry courses.

This study devised two tests, one giving an algebra problem phrased in the context of chemistry and the same problem with all the chemistry content removed and written as a math problem. While the paper had it's weaknesses, the experiment was simple and the results were interesting:

Students were able to transfer algebra procedural skills to chemistry problems. The authos reported they were surprised by the proficiency with which students did this.

Some students' inability to transfer seemed to be more a result of inadequate understanding of mathematics rather than failures to transfer results to the context of chemistry.

In contrast to their facility with algebra procedures, students seemed unable to draw graphs or use graphical information to solve problems. Students actual scores on this aspect of the test were lower and they showed significantly less confidence in their abilities.

Finally the paper concludes, perhaps tenuously, that students have trouble transferring between graphical and algebraic thinking. In other words they can't use information from graphs to supplement what they learn from algebra or vice versa.

It should be noted that this study was performed in South Africa so the preparation of students there may be different than our own students here at OSU.

Two of these results support things I have repeatedly observed in my own classes of engineering seniors. First students aren't as comfortable using graphs as they should be at this point in their degree, and they certainly are not good at creating graphs. Second, the last of these conclusions is perhaps the most interesting to me from an educational research perspective. This paper hints at the fact that students seem to have a rote procedure for getting correct answers without being able to draw from multiple approaches. All of us that teach engineering education have certainly seen this in our classes. A common complaint is that many students don't think about procedures before they apply them.

I would argue that a sound conceptual understanding is vital to developing such metacognition. And now I've identified a gap in my own understanding of education. What are the best and most effective techniques for teaching conceptual understanding? Anybody out there have any good reference on this?

"...we cannot remain who we are"

2009-03-14T15:09:00.008-05:00

The title of this post is taken from a short editorial in the Christian Science Monitor (linked in the title) from the president of Ohio State University, Gordon Gee. In the editorial he speaks about the need to use these days of financial uncertainty to fundamentally reform higher education. He posits that in a very global world the structure of higher education is too restrictive to really let us prepare graduates for the very (strange and wonderful) | (dangerous and terrifying) world in which we find ourselves.

While not deep in the sense of referencing research or statistics on education, the editorial did home in on something I personally have come to believe over the last few years- the university's problems are more structural than pedagogical. In the way the editorial was phrased, President Gee sees that a narrow focus on disciplinary knowledge can't prepare students for working in the world. Students collaborate naturally; course structures which inhibit sharing knowledge and experience no longer mimic life. In this he is right but I don't think he goes far enough...

Our focus at universities has historically been to address the need for students to master some part of the shared knowledge of the human race. Knowledge must be personal to be useful, so we see our goal as transmitting through the mouths of faculty what is known about a discipline to our students, who we hopefully develop enough of a relationship with to make learning somewhat personal. There is really nothing wrong with this approach, a lot of research supports the fact that experts have a lot of relevant knowledge in their heads where it can be accessed easily and quickly when they are confronted with a problem. And passing this on to non-experts is a good thing. The problem comes from how we transmit this knowledge and, perhaps more subtly, the need for us to grade. To assign "meaningful" grades we believe we need to give rigorous tests and homework assignments. However the very rigor of the grading schemes we use are, I think, their downfall. The knowledge I personally have found most useful in my career is the knowing of ways of doing things. Such knowing is general, flexible, adaptable, and very very hard to teach. Such tacit knowledge is difficult to measure using an exam; I still can't do this well despite years of tinkering with exams.

And this is the message I took from President Gee's article. At universities we trade effort for grades with the hope that learning occurs somehow in the effort. But the efforts needed to develop effective and learned citizens for today's society don't mesh well with what schools have historically done. We can't remain who we are if we are to claim that the education we offer is worth the price we now charge.

Hey, where's all the geek women at?

2009-02-23T08:29:00.004-06:00

The reading assignment for this week's journal club was the chapter in Talking About Leaving that discussed gender issues in engineering education. My first impression on this chapter was that I don't live in the same world as my female students. This chapter makes the very powerful point that the culture of engineering is overwhelming and that members of that culture (i.e. men) simply don't understand the issues that women in our discipline face. On one level I knew this, but this chapter really made me internalize what this means and internalize my own helplessness by simply being who I am.

At one level this is is quite depressing. I've spent a lot of time mentoring women in research, developed programs, and thought I knew what I was doing. After reading this chapter I realize much of what I had thought was helping might not have been.

This chapter brought up a debate that I have been having in my own head for quite some time. We all characterize the discipline of engineering in our own heads. Hopefully these mental images (schema) match with the actual practice of engineering. So here is the conundrum: how do you satisfy both the rigor of professional practice AND the need to develop students so their own self-image doesn't crash head on with the the professional image they need to adopt to succeed in the discipline.

So how does this chapter and what I've learned about the difficulties women in STEM disciplines face impact my practice of teaching? Honestly I don't know... I feel very torn as a man to try to bridge to women who are in science. I feel that since I can't effectively step outside my own culture (i.e. the predominately male engineering culture that is the problem) the odds of making a mis-step are quite high. In other words I can cause more harm than good through my own fumblings outside my culture. About the only thing I might do to improve my teaching is to team with a woman in teaching classes in which retention is an issue.

Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline!

2009-02-09T07:15:00.008-06:00

This post is about our on-going journal club over "the math problem", particularly chapters 3 and 4 of the book Talking About Leaving. This book should be read by anyone who teaches engineering- preferably early in their career.

There is a lot of good stuff in these chapters that makes a powerful case we are doing our students a great disservice by trying to do our profession a great service. I remember that the first time I read this book I got emotional and upset when I hit chapter 3; and getting emotional over most scientific publications is hard! I've always let my heart run away from my head when I see what I perceive to be injustice, and chapter 3 really paints a picture of the injustice we do our students. Why injustice?

We sucker students into joining STEM disciplines without doing a good job of explaining what exactly you can expect your career and life options to be.
We place greater emphasis on the disciplinary knowledge than the people who make up the discipline. And my alignment has always been chaotic...
The primary reasons that students leave STEM disciplines are due to things the faculty can easily change but don't.
Grades seem to be highly unrelated to what people learn.
Faculty use pedagogical approaches that don't emphasize conceptual understanding with dire consequences for students' long term understanding.

Obviously the list could go on quite a bit longer, chapter 3 is rich in issues than need to be addressed in engineering education. There are really two issues that I feel strongly about in this chapter and want to go into a little more detailed reflection on: the negative impact of grades, and the difficulty of focusing on building conceptual understanding.

First conceptual understanding... How does one design a class to focus on conceptual understanding, what are the concepts that most faculty agree are absolutely critical for a discipline, and what is the correct balance between conceptual and procedural understanding? All these are hard questions and my own reading has not led me to any answers yet. I have always been fascinated with the idea of taking a year off and laying out a conceptual foundation for my discipline. Though I've toyed with this idea I've never put any real effort into pursuing it. One of the first things I would look for is a conceptual taxonomy to rate and value different concepts. Also a conceptual hierarchy if one exists would be valuable in designing a class. Looking into conceptual taxonomies and hierarchies is a possible direction to pursue in later meetings of the journal club.

The balance between procedural and conceptual is perhaps an easier question but might be framed as a "chicken and egg" problem. Does one design lab experiments that illustrate application of concepts, or do you investigate and master concepts as they arise in doing actual engineering work? Again, I don't know the answer.

Grades. Blecch. Do grades serve any positive purpose whatsoever? Grades motivate certain students, but I would argue in the wrong way. Grades are highly uncorrelated to actual knowledge. Grades are a pain in the ass for faculty to assign; there isn't much more boring than the task of grading. Grades give students false impressions of their own level of knowledge. Grades--due to their inherent binary nature--cause moral quandries for faculty who have to balance the harm caused by failing a student with the long term problems that may arise by passing that student.

Hell, it is obviously time to get rid of grades and go with a more sensible system. I think I really need to write the gaming proposal that the imp of the perverse has been whispering in my ear for the last year...

Engineering Education Journal Club: Talking About Leaving ch. 1-2

2009-01-24T06:14:00.008-06:00

We've started a journal club for graduate students and faculty across the disciplines of math, engineering, and education. As part of this we're all blogging about the papers we read in order to compare notes on our perceptions of the literature. So if you aren't interested in this I'd suggest you skip this rather lenghthy post.

The purpose of the journal club is to learn about the "mathematics problem"... This is the perception that students who take upper division courses don't have the necessary math skills to do the work expected by problem. The words "mathematics problem" is in quotes because the perception of the problem is an anecdote from faculty, and the plural of anecdote isn't anecdata.

The first few meeting of our journal club are focusing on the book Talking About Leaving- why undergraduates leave the sciences. I read this excellent book some time ago, and am re-reading it for the journal club. The first thing that struck me was how carefully this research was done and how it was led by what students had to say about their experiences in STEM programs. It seems to me to be very foolish not to consider what this book, and the students quoted in it, has to say about higher education. This is particularly true since one of the most interesting things about TAL is that all their ethnographic data came from those with math SAT scores of 650 or higher (26 ACT or 86th percentile). This biases the data considerably for us at OSU , but I think it is good that it isn't possible simply to dismiss the results as arising from "inferior" students. As a data point in ECE our mean ACT score is about 27 with 25%-75% range of 25-31.

One of the first things that struck me as I was reading chapters one and two was the misperceptions that most of us in higher education have about our own students. For example TAL discusses the distinction between faculty perceptions of what they teach and student perceptions of what they have to learn. Faculty believe a certain percentage of students "can't get it" because the material is hard while students believe that with sufficient effort they should all be able to get it. What would a class look like that was designed to have all students earn an "A"?

Another point that struck me, given an official OSU e-mail I received last week saying all OSU TA's must take an English proficiency exam is the relative lack of importance being a good English speaker had compared to other factors. The English issue was even specifically identified as a misconception.

Another point from TAL that resonated with me was that students who switch from a major and those who stay are very similar in academic ability. It is the fact that we can't seem to maintain their interest in STEM that results in attrition. The comments by students about the lack of intellectual stimulation, the boredom, really resonated with me. I found science and engineering boring when I was an undergraduate too and, looking back, am not really sure why I stayed with it. I guess I read too many Heinlein books as a kid... So one question that comes to mind at this point is what stimulates students' interest in STEM in the first place? What can we change to maintain their interest? What are their expectations?

TAL (p. 35) also discusses that conceptual difficulties can lead to a downward spiral which eventually results in students leaving STEM majors. This seems to be a really critical issue to me, especially since it affects engineers more than other STEM majors. I see it as critical because my own experience teaching primarily upper-division undergraduates reinforces a belief that most students don't have a sound conceptual foundation. However one question I'm left with is what exactly is meant by the phrase "conceptual difficulties"? I hope this is better defined later on or we further explore this issue as our journal club progresses.

One of the other issues brought up in TAL that reinforces my own beliefs is the importance of intrinsic motivation in staying in STEM disciplines and how the experiences of the first two years can reinforce or destroy intrinsic motivation. There is an in-depth analysis of how various motivations--both intrinsic and extrinsic--affect whether students persist in STEM or not. From what I can tell it comes down at a basic level to college having meaning. I think Victor Frankl covers it best in Man's Search for Meaning. So an open question is again what do students find meaningful? How do you identify students who are intrinsically motivated to study engineering?

Near the end of the second chapter of TAL Seymour and Hewitt look at the impact of the lack of high school preparation and how shocked many students were at their lack of preparation. There seems to be a little bit of a disconnect here in the book. Is it a lack of preparation in high school or are the expectations in college simply too high? Is there really such a communication problem in expectations?

Another interesting note is the fact that many students have horrible study habits they learned in high school. I definitely include myself in this category. I can hardly even remember doing homework in high school! A very interesting insight is stated as "...one of the first group of students to be lost are those who have internalized the attitudes of teachers, parents, and peers who confuse talent with achievement." The whole discussion here really reinforces the belief I have that grades are harmful to students and we need to replace them with a more sensible solution. From TAL it is clear a sizable fraction (perhaps as large as 40%) take grades as personal criticism- either positive or negative.

So what do I draw from all of this? What impression am I left with? It seems clear that attrition isn't highly correlated with ability. Those who are more self-aware may be at greater risk for leaving engineering. We do a miserable job of explaining what engineers really do and what you can do with an engineering degree. I am not sure we really even know. It is also clear that while being able to do mathematics is necessary to succeed in engineering, self-perceptions of math ability for incoming freshmen are worthless. Also being competent in mathematics doesn't seem to be a great predictor of staying in engineering. The emphasis TAL places on conceptual understanding makes me believe that a course focusing on providing the conceptual foundation of how math in used in engineering with many hands-on projects would be a viable approach; particularly if study skills were also taught.

Requiem for a black leather jockstrap and a whip...

2009-01-23T18:56:00.015-06:00

I returned from an interview for a new faculty position at a teaching university to find a message in my in-box that a former professor of mine, Bill Wilson, had passed away. "Dr. Bill" taught electrical engineering at Rice University, my alma mater. Many people have influenced my career, but few had a more lasting positive influence than Dr. Bill. So instead of spending Friday night being entertained it seems fitting to remember how life-changing and long-lasting even the smallest events can be.

Rice is a selective, private, research university with a strong undergraduate tradition. I went to Rice from the small town atmosphere of the Panama Canal Zone. To a shy, protected geek Rice was dynamic, exciting, and in the early 1980's very anarchistic. Crazy parties, new people, its own private vocabulary, girls- Rice rolled students under, submerged their identity in its own, and created a strong need to belong. And it is a good thing they did since like many new students I was in over my head academically. The work was intense and never ending, the pressure unrelenting, the fear of failure ever-present. I suffered through the academics to maintain the lifestyle. Always at the back of my mind there was a little voice telling me I wasn't good enough, I wasn't cut out to be an engineer, "this isn't what you were meant to do with your life". And in the long nights of homework and rare moments of quiet reflection I knew I was lonelier than I had ever been before. But weekends of booze and barely-controlled social chaos kept the voice and loneliness at bay most of the time.

The biggest party of the fall semester was Weiss College's Night of Decadence (NoD links here and here); the party is, um, somewhat unrestrained. My first encounter with Dr. Bill, a faculty associate at Weiss, was at NoD in my freshman year. I ran into him in the line for 40 proof punch served from a twenty foot long paper mache penis that would have made a Titan feel inadequate. Dr. Bill had a drink in one hand, a whip in the other, and he was completely unclothed except for a metal studded black leather jockstrap which did little to hide his skinny, white 40-year-old ass. I simply did not believe that this was the first tenured electrical engineering professor I'd met at Rice despite assurances from my friends that he did in fact teach EE classes. Though I didn't talk to Dr. Bill again for nearly two years, this first meeting made a big impression on me.

After the initial novelty, life at Rice settled into a grinding routine. The loneliness increased along with the work. The voice also became more insistent as my enjoyment of schoolwork waned. I reached the nadir at the end of my sophomore year when the loneliness, work, and lack of meaning of constant homework made me give serious thought to switching majors or dropping out. I hated what I was doing and had no idea from my classes what it was engineers even did. But always there was an image of a middle aged, balding man in a black leather jockstrap and a whip enjoying the hell out himself in a crowd of students half his age. And I'd think to myself "Look at Dr. Bill, being an engineer can't be that uncool. Maybe people do emerge from this with their soul intact. If I just get through the next week.."

Dr. Bill's electromagnetics class in my junior year was the first engineering class I had at Rice where I had a sense that I "got it". He explained things simply and intuitively. So I specialized in electromagnetics, optics, and solid state--arguably the least intuitive sub-discipline of EE--to take more of his classes. I still didn't know what I wanted to do when I graduated so went to graduate school both due to Dr. Bill's encouragement and my own hazy vision of becoming a faculty member in order to lead a life like his. Being a professor like Dr. Bill seemed nearly ideal career choice to a lost, 21-year-old displaced beach bum. He was a kind and sane voice during my first traumatic years as a graduate student. Over time my life was influenced even more strongly by others, and eventually I found my own direction and pursued my own goals. But I never fail to smile when I remembered my electromagnetic fields professor in a black leather jockstrap and a whip. Any sanity, commonsense, and humanity that I've managed to retain during my academic research career so far I owe, in part, to the mental image of Dr. Bill and his metal-studded black leather jockstrap.

So on this Friday night I raise a pint of beer in your memory Dr. Bill, you will be sorely missed. I resolve never again to try to hard to maintain what little dignity I have in front of my students, to take myself or what I teach too seriously, or be too busy to take the time to explain engineering to the lost souls. Reflecting back I see that the smallest thing we do can resonate far beyond our own life but only if done with humor, grace, and a keen sense of our own folly. Although it is hard to say good bye, I know you had fun.

Deans and Erections

2009-01-16T07:14:00.008-06:00

I grew up in the Panama Canal Zone during the time Omar Torrijos was "El Hombre" in Panama and during Manuel Noriega's early years. One of the jokes at the time of Torrijo's death was about a giant skyscraper built built in Panama city right on the Avenida Balboa; reputedly to launder drug money. With typical Panamanian humor it was nicknamed "Torrijos' Last Erection". At the time I left Panama the edifice stood mainly empty, a tribute to building for buildings' sake.

About a month ago both The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed summarize a report by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs. You can also download the actual report in PDF Format. I actually read most of this report and found it supported a trend I've observed locally at my institution- vice presidents, athletic directors, and deans have been dipping from the till to finance their own grand dreams of what a university should be.

Lets look at a few of the more enlightening findings of the Delta report:

The report points out that "How colleges actually spend their money is barely understood by the general public and even many policy makers." I can speak to this firsthand- I have no idea where money goes or comes from, only there seems to be a lot of it floating around.
The overall verdict of the report is that while costs are increasing dramatically very little of the money students at public institutions are paying is going to their education! "In all institutional groupings — public and private — tuition prices increased faster than education and general spending per student. This suggests that both public and private institutions are becoming more dependent on tuition as a source of general revenue — not just to pay for education and related expenses, but as a general subsidy for all functions, including research and service."
Colleges play funny games with how they describe tuition. For example the "sticker price" of tuition is lower than gross tuition revenues. In other words colleges raise mandatory fees faster than tuition. According to the report "Institutions are also turning to user fees to fund many functions (e.g., technology fees), which have become a significant source of revenue." Again I can see this at my institution. Surprisingly students seem to simply accept these increases lying down.
The increased tuition is going to pay for costs other than education. "In public research universities, about 92 percent of the increase in student tuitions since 2002 can be attributed to shifts in revenue, while 8 percent went to actual increases in spending." Put into actual numbers the in-state average tuition for full-time undergraduates increased 29.8% from 2002-2006 while education and general spending per FTE student only increased 2.5%.

The reason universities are jacking up tuition to fund non-education activities is that their traditional sources of funding are drying up like a slug in a salt mine. On my campus it appears to a casual observer that all the extra tuition money is likely going into a building spree. In the ten years I've been a faculty member our engineering college has built or has under construction three new buildings- two are giant research buildings of over 100,000 square feet. Other powers-that-be within the institution have also indulged- we have a new stadium thanks to Boone Pickens, several new research building, an off-campus technology park, and a multi-modal transportation facility (this is a fancy name for parking garage and bus stop). I am an engineer, not an economist, but it seems obvious that even if the building are funded completely through donations the energy to run these buildings costs money as does the staff to populate, clean, and maintain them. And at least some of the money came from bond issues, and those need to be repaid, draining more money from operating expenses.

When I was interviewing for faculty positions I was very impressed by the lab space my university had just built, but as I've grown more experienced I begin to question how much value infrastructure has without the people and culture to sustain it. The real problems I have had in doing research are always people problems, not building or equipment problems. My guess is that the great institutions are great because of their culture, not their buildings. Didn't Fermi make the first nuclear reactor under the football stadium stairs in Chicago? But it is easy to put up buildings compared to changing a culture; especially for engineers. Lets hope we can learn to address the people and cultural problems with the zeal we have for building. Time is running out.

The Beginning of the Semester Blues

2009-01-14T10:05:00.004-06:00

I had hoped over the break to change myself and my time management skills enough that I didn't get rolled under by the start of the semester. But again I find myself overwhelmed with minutiae, nibbled to death by mice. I remember reading in the excellent book Tomorrow's Professor that all faculty feel these time pressures and have to come up with various tricks of time triage to survive academia.

It is time we rose up against the time tyranny of the academic calendar. So for this post I am attaching a letter to the editor I wrote for the student paper at my school, Oklahoma State University (OSU) last year, in hopes it can start a national movement...

Another Modest Proposal

In 1729 Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal satirically suggested the Irish eat their children to help alleviate poverty. Swift’s commentary is applicable to OSU nearly three centuries later; more and more our “children” are consuming us both body and soul. The children referred to are meetings.

From my perspective as an OSU faculty member there have been many changes to our campus—both positive and negative—over the past five years. The increasing centralization of administration, creation of campus-wide incentives and institutes, and a focus on excellence in research and teaching are changing the campus environment. As with any change there are both positive and negative impacts on organizations and individuals; this is expected. One offspring of this change, however, is the seemingly uncontrolled growth of meetings. Meetings are the unwanted children of change that consume the most valued of faculty resources- time. Specifically, the long periods of uninterrupted time needed to reflect, conduct research, or engage in other creative activities that are the engine that ultimately drives “greatness” or “excellence” for a university.

The analogy between meetings and children is apt. Both seem like a good idea at the time, start small, and tend to grow to demand an inordinate amount of time and resources. While both children and meetings can be highly rewarding at times they are mainly just unrewarded work. In the institutional quest for greatness it is past time for OSU to practice “safe sex”. While from a faculty perspective an abstinence-based policy would be ideal, it would probably have a similar track record to abstinence-based efforts in other domains. Rather some form of birth control is needed to limit the uncontrolled growth of meetings.

What I propose is that OSU adopt an official policy of holding meetings only on Monday and Friday. Institute a complete and total ban on holding a formal meeting in the period from Tuesday through Thursday. Monday allows critical issues to be addressed at the start of a week while Friday is a good day to review ongoing projects. Meeting only at the start and end of a week gives faculty three uninterrupted days to focus on scholarship and teaching. There are many possible criticisms of this modest proposal. To the argument that two days are simply not enough time in which to schedule vital meetings note that: 1) these two days are 40% of the entire week, and 2) it will be much easier to schedule meetings if faculty and staff know they will occur only on Monday or Friday. Overall any disadvantages of a three day meeting ban are outweighed by the austere simplicity of this approach.

Alan Cheville

Lessons from Tinkerbell

2009-01-05T15:28:00.011-06:00

My four year old daughter has fallen in love with Tinkerbell, and of all the heavily marketed mythical critters designed for the entertainment of children Tink is not a bad choice. It could have been Elmo or (God forbid) Barney. Yesterday we rented the new, direct to DVD Tinkerbell movie; we watched it this morning and it was surprisingly good. But what you should ask does Tinkerbell have to do with engineering education?

To provide a little background, Disney is currently marketing fairies of all types to the demographic represented by my daughter. Tinkerbell is one of the marketing tools which also include Pixie Hollow, a quasi-MMORPG for pre-teens. As part of this effort Tinkerbell is getting a new history, friends, and career far beyond that laid out by J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan.

In the movie Tinkerbell, we learn that Tinkerbell's name isn't really Tinkerbell at all, but Bell. Each fairy has a naturally gifted talent--working with animals, bringing the winds, etc.--and Bell discovers her talent is being a Tinker. Bell the Tinker...Tinkerbell. In the movie Tinkers are the engineers of the fairy world, working behind the scenes to enable other fairies to carry out their work of keeping Nature running smoothly. During the movie Tinkerbell rebels against being a Tinker, creates havoc in the land of fairies, saves the day through her engineering talent, and finally accepts who and what she is.

Recommendation: Two slide rules up!

While I'm not one to cheer on blatant marketing to a pre-teen demographic by a mega-corporation such as Disney, Tinkerbell is a wonderful metaphor for explaining the value of engineering (tinkering) to young people. Most of the textbooks for pre-engineering and introductory engineering courses I've read attempt to explain why engineers are important. On the excitement scale these attempts fall somewhere between "waiting for a haircut" and "grab on the way to a long stop in a public restroom". While the stories they tell are technically accurate they lack the warmth, humor, and plain joie de vivre that comes through in Tinkerbell. How often in engineering do we cling tightly to accuracy at the expense of passion? Sure it is necessary to be dispassionate at times, to let the numbers speak, to accept the fact that dreams simply can't be built. But how often do we let the need for dispassion override the power and dignity of the stories we could tell?

In the stage version of Peter Pan Tinkerbell finds doubt fatal. In her movie Tinkerbell struggles with but survives her self-doubt. Like Tinkerbell in the movie our students need to discover for themselves the value of engineering, of enabling the great work of this age. Without stories, without tales of heroes, without a guiding mythology it is hard for many students to discover passion in a dispassionate discipline. As an undergraduate I often doubted that I would emerge from an engineering program with the brighter parts of my soul intact. Like Tinkerbell many young engineers find doubt fatal.

Our discipline has worthwhile stories to tell. We as educators need to recognize that even very young listeners are able to distinguish stories from reality and to do a better job of telling the stories what engineering means as well as the movie Tinkerbell does.

An explanation, an article, and a memelet...

2008-12-19T12:33:00.009-06:00

First of all I thought it would be worth posting a little more of an explanation about the title of this blog. Legend has it that the physicist Ernest Rutherford walked into his lab one day and announced "Well boys, we are very short of money so we must begin to think." I like this quote because it has always seemed that having a lot of money enables a professor to avoid much of the hard work of thinking. Actually it is probably worse that that; having money interferes with thinking because of all the damn paperwork that goes along with grants.

For some time I've thought we in the United States have been slowly bankrupting ourselves. I am afraid that the "good times" at universities where faculty who spend time grant writing are flush with money may soon come to an end. If or when this happens all of us in engineering education are going to be challenged to think very hard about how we can realize the change we talk about without much in the way of resources. Thanks to the work of many individuals in the science and engineering education community what to do is becoming clear- what we need to think about is how to make the changes happen...

An interesting article came out in Science this week (vol. 322, p. 1795) that looks at the importance of science faculty trained in education. The article is a short read and worthwhile just for the references. The main conclusions are the value of SFES's (Science Faculty with Education Specialties) in addressing many of the educational needs of the US and the dangers of the job. To quote the article, "Almost 40% of the 59 SFES were “seriously considering leaving” their current jobs... [those faculty hired into science education positions] most commonly reported that they were considering leaving because their science education efforts were not valued or understood. [Those faculty who were hired for research but turned into science educators], in contrast, reported being overworked and burned out."

Amen to that! The myth of being an excellent researcher and excellent teacher is just that for most of us. A myth. Lots of studies have found no correlation between performance in research and teaching but my dean hasn't read those studies. He still wants to hire a superman. This article supports the efforts of some forward-looking programs to value engineering educators and build community among them. I just hope more administrators take notice.

The following doesn't qualify as a meme, hence the made up name "memelet". I saw this clever cartoon today that made the point that most "mad scientists" were really "mad engineers". Not to belittle the value, methods, and contributions of science but sometimes all you want is to do something not understand it to the N^th degree. It has always seemed to me that we have gone too far towards science and don't always recognize the value of the engineer.

Another call for change...

2008-12-17T12:21:00.007-06:00

I was directed to the article linked above by First Bell, a service that provides daily summaries of news on engineering and engineering education to ASEE members. The article from EE Times is worth reading if you haven't been following the debate in why engineering education needs to be reformed. In brief, James Plummer, Stanford's dean of engineering, calls for ten reforms in how engineering is taught. All ten are actually feasible and realistic goals for any porogram. Of course to nobody's surprise it sounds like Stanford does all ten, but one wonders how well...

Why do I think this article is important? In the first place it reflects the increasing calls for significant, and perhaps even radical, changes in how we teach engineering by an ever more vocal minority. Those espousing change include more and more deans, department heads, and other administrators who have the authority and budgets to make such change happen. The other reason this article is important is that it provides a list of ten things an individual faculty member can actually do to improve how students are taught engineering. Pick one, any one. How can you make it happen on your campus?

From my own recent experience I found the a little bittersweet in comparing the attitude of Stanford's dean with those at my own university. Last week I had a chance to sit down and talk with an administrator in my own engineering college about educating students. He complained that engineering education hadn't published any studies that showed improving how instructors taught resulted in improvements in learning. His opinion was that all the engineering education literature focused on designing new, resource-intensive labs that most programs couldn't implement. I'm not surprised by this ignorance- it wasn't that long ago that I was as poorly informed.

So today I e-mailed the administrator a nice literature review created byJeff Froyd at Texas A&M University on the effectiveness of active learning. You can find a copy on the Engineering Students for the 21st Century website. It is definitely worth reading if you are wondering if there are ways to change traditional teaching to improve how well students learn.