Declining by Degrees—A Discussion

This forum article is a discussion of the book Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk, edited by Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, concerning issues related to declining standards and quality of university education (please see www.decliningbydegrees.org for details). The discussion was compiled from a string of e-mail messages in response to an article about the book, and was contributed to by members of the Body of Knowledge (BOK) e-mail list maintained by Professor Jeff Russell of the University of Wisconsin. Discussion authors include: Richard Anderson, Brian Brenner, Jonathan Byrd, Chick Glagola, Peter Hoadley, Birdel F. Jackson III, Merlin Kirschenman, Dave Martinelli, Walt Massie, Bobby E. Price, Steve Ressler, Ernie Smerdon, Maher K. Tadros, and Stuart Walesh. The discussion is presented in chronological order below, with some editing to account for simultaneous streams.

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Thanks for the article. It resonates with my teaching experience and related observations over several decades. Perhaps this is sign of the decline in formal education, but I increasingly notice that I can attend meetings of educators and hear little talk about students—it is mostly money and research, both of which are connected and important.

However, what is the mission of education?

To be fair and balanced, now as a practitioner I must remind myself, and gently remind my peers, that our reason for being is our clients.

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Your observations are right on with what many of us have observed, and is another wake up call! Fortunately some universities are creating sessions on teaching methods for the faculty. However, it is utilized primarily by faculty on a voluntary basis and not a faculty requirement.

As far as engineering colleges are concerned it is my observations that a lot of the problem relates to the system that defines the credentials to be a faculty, the faculty development process, and the incentives and rewards for promotion and tenure. Unfortunately, there is little in this system that addresses student learning in the education process and the teaching methods that effectively result in student learning. Hope we can address some of this deficiency in our raise the bar effort.

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Unfortunately, the problem of undergraduate engineering education as outlined in the concerns that we are passing around, from my observation, is quite simple. The persons able to make changes in the directions that engineering education will take are not the ones, for the most part, who are interested in undergraduate engineering education. It’s mostly about the two things that drive many processes in our society, money and power. Department chairs want to be deans, deans want to be provosts, and provosts want to be presidents, and presidents want to leave your school for one that is higher in the US News and World Report rankings.

This observation may sound heretical and it may sound like frustrated ranting, but there’s more truth than fiction in what I’m saying here. If bringing in more research is the flavor of the day, these people who are in a position to influence the process will go with the flavor that allows them to achieve their goals. Currently the flavor is that we must be in the “top ten.” This comes from the president of the university down through the ranks. If your university doesn’t want to be in the top ten, I’d like to apply for a job there. The perceived way to achieve this top ten standing at the department level is to: (1) bring in lots of research (money); (2) [employ] lots of perceived expert faculty; and (3) produce lots of PhDs (master’s hardly count in many top-level programs).

The perceived way to achieve this at the college level is to impress the provost by beating up the departments to: (1) bring in more research (money), and here I emphasize the money aspect as it is my observation that deans don’t count state agency research very highly toward promotion and tenure since it only brings in 5 percent overhead in my state; and (2) throw the majority of your money at the flavor of the day, such as “nano” or “bio,” where there are more money opportunities than in other departments (and in particular civil [engineering]), and also [at] marketing opportunities, since these types of engineering programs are currently in the public view through media. The perceived way to achieve this standing at the provost level, in the tradition of a provost’s job description, is to run interference for the president, and if being in the top ten is what the president wants, that’s what the provost wants. Provosts don’t get to be presidents if they aren’t good lieutenants. The perceived way to achieve this standing from the presidential level is to dictate to those below that the most important things that this university can do is to improve its standing in US News and World Report to make me look more important and successful than I really am. This does not mean paying the least bit of attention to undergraduate education. None of these scenarios includes attention to, let alone improvement of, undergraduate education. Guys, when I said that there is more truth than fiction to this scenario, I meant it, and if you don’t believe it, stop and imagine if one of us occupied each of these positions at your university. Don’t you believe that many of the concerns that we have would instantly (or almost) evaporate? That is, of course, only if you’re not one of those “top ten” guys.

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This story, unfortunately, is not a new one. But it is probably leading to an increasing erosion of quality undergraduate engineering education, particularly as some educators with experience and dedication to teaching who were “grandfathered” into the system retire, and those with similar credentials couldn’t be considered today as replacements because they’re not tenurable. The solution is for civil engineers to insist that the tenure process include teaching ability and experience as real requirements. Are we working on the solution?

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In response to your question about working on the solution to the decline problem, the short answer is that we are.

The somewhat longer answer follows. ASCE defines the CE BOK as having three parts—or as standing on three legs—as described and recommended in the report “CE BOK for the 21st Century.” These legs are:

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What I neglected to add to my tirade was that somewhere along the line the required faculty triad of “teaching, research, and service” has been discarded (actually), although every dean I’ve heard still says that this balance is important and is what is expected of the new faculty (this is an attempt at political correctness and deserves a good Animal House: BS….BS….BS….BS). The reality at your larger (now mostly designated as research I) universities, as we all know, is research and money to the exclusion of the other two components. I think this begs the question among our concerned peers, “How can we get back to making this three-component requirement a reality (again)?” Or by asking deans, or better yet, US News and World Report, the second question: “What’s wrong with using this balance to determine world-class programs and universities?” Please don’t get me started on US News and World Report, I don’t think my blood pressure can take it.

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I respectfully must disagree with some of the thoughts expressed in this discussion. Universities and indeed individual departments must take much of the blame for this problem, but it is not because teaching is taking a back seat to research and to research dollars. Here are some things that I have found in my experience in the academy that lead me to this opinion:Now, I am not naive, and understand that research expectations have been rising for some time, but there are factors and causes that are far more to blame for this problem. Consider:Well, I can go on and on, but you get the idea.

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Do you speak anecdotally or is there some specific survey from which you draw your conclusions? For example, you write, “The better researchers are many times the better teachers—the two are integrated to form scholarship.” Is this just your experience or is there a survey which actually measures this?

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There is an excellent scholarly paper on this subject, written by Professor Rich Felder. I’ve extracted a key portion of the paper below:

Perhaps the most telling indication of the nature of the research—teaching interaction is provided by Alexander Astin (5) in a landmark study conducted in the late 1980s. Astin accumulated data on faculty members and almost 25,000 students at 309 institutions of higher education. For each institution, he assessed the faculty’s research orientation (as measured by research publications, research funding, time spent away from campus on research-related activities, and self-rated importance of engaging in research and being recognized for research achievement) and student orientation (level of interest in students’ academic and personal problems, sensitivity to minority issues, accessibility outside office hours, opportunities for student-faculty interaction), correlating each orientation with a variety of measures of student performance and attitudes.

The results are striking. Research orientation of the faculty correlates negatively with completion of the bachelor’s degree, various other measures of academic performance, and student satisfaction with quality of instruction and the overall college experience (p. 338). Student orientation of the faculty correlates positively with bachelor’s degree completion, overall academic attainment, student satisfaction with quality of instruction, and self-reported growth in preparation for graduate school, writing skills, leadership abilities, general knowledge, and public speaking skills (pp. 341–342). Research orientation and student orientation are negatively correlated (p. 338).

The quantitative results of the study led Astin to reject the assertion that research and teaching are mutually supportive. On the contrary, he concludes that “In certain respects, the two poles of this factor [research versus student orientation] reinforce the commonly held notion that, in American higher education, there is a fundamental conflict between research and teaching” (p. 67) and that “Attending a college whose faculty is heavily research oriented increases student dissatisfaction and impacts negatively on most measures of cognitive and affective development. Attending a college that is strongly oriented toward student development shows the opposite pattern of effects (p. 363).

Certainly there are professors who are both good researchers and good teachers, but their presence on faculties (and hence the occasional slight positive correlation between research and teaching performance) proves nothing, since they are likely to get promotion and tenure where professors who are excellent teachers and fair or poor researchers are not. The real question is whether an institutional emphasis on research activity improves or detracts from teaching quality. The evidence clearly points to the latter (extracted from “The Myth of the Superhuman Professor” by Richard Felder [1994], Journal of Engineering Education, 82(2), 105–110; view online at http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/Mythpap.html).

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Thanks for this article. Once I read it I realized that I have heard others refer to Dr. Felder’s work before. I have heard from too many peers that “great researchers make great teachers,” and the comment is usually followed by an anecdote: “My fluids professor was a great teacher who wrote twenty journal articles every year and had six funded proposals per year, etc.” I can share my own anecdotes for and against the notion; however, as professionals we need to base our conclusions on rational inquiry and not solely on personal experience. Dr. Felder’s conclusions, based on published rational inquiries, are not surprising. We would do well to heed his words.

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An interesting reply. While the study has some value, we must be careful how we interpret it. Without getting into the merits of the study, I don’t believe it supports the notion that the problem in student effort and expectation that we read about in Declining by Degrees can be attributed significantly to faculty engagement in research. There is a difference between the “declining by degrees” syndrome and the “student orientation” explored in this study.

Within research institutions, I have found that passion in the lab translates to passion in the classroom. This does not mean that profs at research institutions make better teachers than those at nonresearch institutions—the truth is likely to be otherwise. My comments are not based on scientific research, but do reflect the sentiments of discussions with colleagues around the country as well as [at my university]. In my own department, the correlation is near 100 percent—that is, profs tend to have equal engagement and success in research and teaching. I’m not saying that research necessarily makes one a better teacher. But I am saying that successful research is not generally a detraction to good teaching.

Thanks for your reply. This is indeed an interesting subject. I enjoy the debate!

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A response and more food for thought.

It’s refreshing to hear your input regarding the program at [your university]—it sounds like my kind of program. However, I don’t believe that this sort of thinking will get you into the top ten (you will be in my top ten however). As I indicated before, a balanced program such as you describe is where we all should be and most of us have been, but that’s not where you will find many other (top twenty-five) programs and, I submit, is not the direction that the majority of universities in the top twenty-five ranking are taking.

Let me ask you this: Do you reward a balanced portfolio of teaching, research, and service as much as you do the high research producers? If you do, you won’t be in the top twenty-five.

Do you recruit new faculty on their ability to provide these three important components? If you do, you wont be in the top twenty-five.

Do you baseline peer universities who are in the top twenty-five and try to be like them? If you do you will be killing the morale and drive of faculty who want to operate with a balanced effort of teaching, research, and service.

Do your constituencies within your state want you to produce engineers or scientists? If they want you to concentrate on producing the best engineers, then you won’t be in the top twenty-five.

We have all heard comments from colleagues such as, “I wouldn’t send my kid to a famous up-East engineering university as an undergraduate on a dare.” Why do you think statements like that are being made? I submit that in larger states such as Florida, the majority of our future engineers are and will be coming out of one of the other (and I think there are eight or more) engineering programs because of our change in focus. It appears that we no longer give a [hoot] about what our constituents want; it appears that we concentrate on what the administration wants. If we keep this up we may make the top ten.

What I described in the earlier e-mail probably doesn’t apply to the majority of engineering programs in the country, but I’ll go on the stand as an expert witness that it does apply to all of those who have changed their focus, and believe the BS of the US News and World Report rankings. Most of these programs have simply abandoned their original principles of educating the next generation of high-quality engineers and pay little attention to what their constituencies want, or they select visiting committees who have bought in to the ranking BS. Their attitude is to let the smaller inferior engineering programs produce the workers (that would be P.E.’s).

Are the rankings important? Don’t get me wrong, I think (or I’m told) they are very important, although I wish that we didn’t have them. They, I’m told, help us get money, attract the best students, make us feel superior when we really aren’t, etc., but so does a winning football team. What the rankings have done is to require excellent engineering programs to refocus to a set of standards that are not set by the faculty, our professional societies (ASCE, NSPE), the constituent engineers and engineering firms, parents of students, or any of the other important stakeholders in the process. In a Faustian way, programs that lose this focus are selling their souls, so to speak.

One of my main worries is that this is becoming a cancer, and otherwise excellent programs are refocusing because of rankings and losing the important aspects of their programs that made them excellent in the first place; I hope I’m wrong and that only the really large and stupid programs will continue to do this.

I love the quip that most of us have heard related to rankings: “Now please remind me, just how many of us can be in this top ten?”

When we all roll over and whisper “Rosebud,” it will be too late.

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These are some very interesting comments….

You may be interested in proposing a solution to this unbalance in faculty effort in some institutions. The article about how Berkeley has ties to industry and balances research with practical engineering indicates the system works for them. It hasn’t taken away from their research effort.

Your proposed solution needs to address that engineering is a profession of practice, so our programs must prepare our graduates to practice engineering. In my opinion if a program’s main emphasis is primarily scientific research and does not prepare graduates to be practicing engineers, than the programs should have other designations, not engineering.

Hope you take up this challenge and propose a solution, possibly how to modify the existing system so the result will create the balance we need. Good Luck!

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This topic seemed to strike a nerve. Allow me add to the debate. I was an assistant professor . . . in the 1970s. I have been with [a major university] since 1979. I was a chair of another (troubled) department for two years. I have been on P and T committees numerous times. It is my consistent experience that:

I am one of the minority faculty, in my opinion, with balanced research and teaching. I teach two courses a semester although I could buy out of one or both. It is really tough to keep up with both areas, especially research. The other colleagues in my area (structures) are: (1) three high-volume researchers who almost never teach and are getting away with it; (2) one researcher (besides me) with a balance of teaching and research; and (3) one who does not care to do research but does an excellent job teaching three courses a semester. Guess who has the lowest salary!

Something needs to be done to convince administrators that our most important task is to educate our students. When I was one of them for two years, I fell into the same trap. I have no good suggestions to give.

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I have been reading the comments for the last few days and I’ve seen very little from the “users” of your “products.” As a “user” for the last twenty-eight years, I find our efforts fall short of our colleagues in the other learned professions, such as accountancy and law. The object of the two are to produce practitioners.

In civil engineering our objective should be the same. We would not think of having our taxes prepared by a person or firm without a CPA; similarly, we wouldn’t seek legal advice from one who has not passed the bar. The objective of civil engineering training should be the preparation of practicing registered professionals to serve humanity. I’ve seen and heard a lot of discussion about the cost of an engineering education and the demands placed on the programs by academic administrations. I think the measure of our worth will be found in the substance of engineers we produce that do and will serve mankind. Of late we have been “commoditized” in the computer revolution. Our formulas and calculations, produced at “nano” speed, render us merely as data input technicians, and our public agencies have treated and compensated us accordingly.

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I have been searching for civil engineering talent for the last two years to work for my firm, a general civil engineering practice that provides civil/site, aviation, and highway design. Most of the undergraduate candidates have not been exposed to the current software for design in these areas and thus have to be compensated below the level of a technician until they are up the learning curve. I’ve managed to hire a co-op student and another who’ve met the criteria. The masters graduates have completed a thesis or project that has little to do with the needs of the general consulting community, want to immediately to be managers because of the advanced degree, and know nothing about public works engineering. I’m still searching for more undergraduates who have the training and exposure to work in the consulting business.

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It seems that our dilemma is the survival of our profession does not lie with the “publish or perish,” “generate research dollars” mandates, but with the “manufacture” of a “product” that will serve the needs of the consumer—humanity.

I have been following this train of e-mails and find the discussion stimulating. Regretfully, it gets back to “us versus them,” teaching versus research, faculty versus administrators, etc., etc., etc. I go back several days ago to [an earlier] message and echo strong support of what [was] said. What are we doing for our client? I taught civil engineering . . . for thirty-two years. Many years ago my daughter cross-stitched a long statement that began, “The student is the most important person on campus.” Not the faculty, not the administrators, but the students! I kept that framed document near my office door so that when I left the office for the classroom or lab, I would see it. I believe that statement with all the passion I can generate.

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The question is, are we turning out graduates who can enter the workforce and make a convincing contribution, or do their employees have to teach/train them to overcome deficiencies in their undergraduate degree program? I believe ASCE is right on track with its Policy 465, and especially on the Body of Knowledge that has been forthcoming. I support that policy and am working on the Licensure Committee of the Committee on Academic Prerequisites for Professional Practice $\left({\mathrm{CAP}}^3\right)$ to do whatever I can whenever I can to move that effort along.

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We really don’t have state-supported universities; we have state-assisted universities. As has been mentioned in some of the e-mails, state assistance usually ranges below 50 percent. To survive, most universities have to rely on the almighty research dollar. Faculty members have to generate enough research dollars to pay their salaries, GA and RA support, and indirect costs. Frankly, teaching becomes secondary. Are we allowing research to support the teaching effort or is research the tail wagging the dog? Students are not blind to that ordering of priorities. I served as an ABET evaluator for civil engineering programs and have visited the R1s and the others. The students definitely know the difference.

And, I close with what I started with and what drove meduring my years of teaching, research, and service, “The student is the most important person on campus.”

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You hit the nail right on the head. The student is the most important person. Everything else is to facilitate the education of the students.

I have a sign similar to yours right next to my door that I must pass by every time I leave my office.

Rule #1: If we don’t take care of our clients, somebody else will.

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Your Rule #1 is so true. I appreciate yours and others’ stands on this matter.

One thing I forgot to put in my message yesterday is that all the promotion and tenure policies I have seen [at various universities]….usually state in the first paragraph that teaching is most important, BUT then go through the rest of the document telling what levels of research and external funding are needed to gain P&T. Teaching is usually not mentioned again. And, try to get P&T with an emphasis on good teaching. I had to smile at one of the recent e-mails we all received, because the writer at the R1 university stated GOOD teaching and EXCELLENT research are needed to gain P&T. I capped the words to make a point.

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You have a point, but I think we need to be careful here. Treating students as “customers” is one of the causes of the problem. Recall the following quote from the Merrow piece: “The message our kids get is that they’re not students; they’re consumers. And if they’re willing to settle for ‘purchasing’ a degree that means nothing in terms of educational achievement, it’s their right. It’s their investment. In this environment, professors, colleges, and universities are forced into giving the customers what they want, not necessarily what they should want.”

Parker Palmer in his excellent book “The Courage to Teach” points out that we have swung from the teacher-centered university (one extreme) to the student-centered university (the other extreme). Real learning is neither teacher-centered or student-centered—it’s subject centered. That is, the subject is the one thing that is bigger than the teacher and the bigger than the student.

The solution, I believe, lies not in less research, or smaller research budgets—as [pointed out earlier], society needs this as much as it needs graduates. The solution lies in adding motivation and inspiration into the teaching repertoire. Providing motivation and inspiration for the subject was less necessary a generation ago. One can be a good teacher without being a good motivator/leader—all one has to do is teach motivated students. But when the motivations have changed—or worse, gone away—teachers must rise to the occasion and become leaders and motivators in addition to presenters of knowledge. Each type of university is differently equipped to respond to this challenge. In the case of the R1s, research is an asset to solving the problem.

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Thanks for your response. Your comments are accepted as you intended them to be.

To me, students are one of the main, if not the main, stakeholder in a university setting. I realize we can add to that employers, parents, state economies, etc. But, the students have to be the focal point when we as educators walk into the classroom or laboratory. Otherwise, we are putting ourselves as faculty members and our personal interests first. I prefer the term “stakeholder” rather than “customer”—why I do not know, except maybe it sounds better! We need to make sure students realize they are students (learners) and not customers.

One sentence from Parker Palmer’s book intrigued me. You quoted him as saying, “Real learning is neither teacher-centered or student-centered—it’s subject centered.” I tend to be more person oriented than project or subject oriented. I can teach the subject without any concern whether or not the student learns or has the capability to learn, or I can teach the subject and be cognizant of the student’s abilities and interest. I prefer the latter.

I hope I did not negate the worthiness of research in my first message. I just said that it needs to be put in the proper perspective. The P&T policies tend heavily toward research and publications, and not on teaching.

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An additional support of the “students as consumers” arguments is that of students at lower-quality institutions. For example, I have a friend majoring in nursing at a community college in Alabama. He is quite proud of the fact that he doesn’t have to “take all of those useless electives” such as literature, music appreciation, and similar classes. It is an appreciation of and understanding of things greater than us that make life worth living. It also adds to the ability to analyze and solve problems. While community colleges lessen their standards, this to an extent causes other universities to lower standards as well. This is what is leading to the decreased credit requirements, and making the work of this committee so important. Unless we want to start “engineering school,” similar to medical school or law school, I do not think we will be able to solve the problem.

Personally, I feel that a higher school for engineers is an excellent way to address the issue. This would provide an opportunity to better prepare engineers to produce products, and experience cutting-edge design software and techniques. While it wouldn’t eliminate the research requirement, it would add to the student’s education as well as postgraduation marketability. It would also ease . . . searches for quality graduates who are able to begin producing effectively [and quickly].

Regardless, the entire line of thought on degrees further demonstrates that the policy of having a master’s for registration is not being driven by academic interests.

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I read all of the email comments as they came in…. I reread them last night and I have these observations:

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I also reread the comments last night and have a few additional points to discuss.

With regard to the displeasure (or if you prefer, inaccuracy) of the ratings by US News and World Report based on their criteria and not ours, I am inclined to say: Don’t just complain, do something about it. Perhaps we, as a profession or an organization, should study each program and issue our own ratings for engineering schools. We could even distribute it to universities, high schools, or other educational facilities where the information can get to those who need it—the fresh mind considering engineering as a profession but who does not know what course of action is best to take. If we do a good enough job of it, we could even distribute it to other engineering societies, not just civil engineers. The more I think about it I am inclined to not only volunteer to help do this, I would consider passing this on to others in ASCE to get their opinions as well.

Regarding each school’s approach as to which areas are important, I point out a personal event. While still working toward my undergraduate degree it came time for my school’s ABET accreditation visit. Since we were transitioning from quarters to semesters, the quarters were getting longer and the breaks between sessions were shorter. There was a two-week break from one quarter to the next, but during those two weeks, all the engineering classrooms underwent a transformation. The walls were painted, the chalkboards were replaced, the tables and chairs were replaced and/or upgraded, and each room had an overhead projector wired and installed in them. It seemed to me that the actions of the administration were taken to simply impress the ABET team (that came a month later), as if their decision might be so close that they would say, “Well we weren’t going to accredit them, but since things look nice….” Is this an accurate description of what the administration intended? Perhaps not; it may have simply been time to upgrade, but it did occur right before the department was evaluated—[the upgrade] had the widespread perception among students that this was the case. Regardless, I enjoyed improved facilities for the remainder of my studies, as well as for my subsequent graduate studies.

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The e-mail discussion about the above article has, in my view, degenerated to a discussion of teaching versus research in relation to one’s professional position within a university. While this is obviously an important issue, I don’t think it was the central theme of the original article. Instead, I distilled an entirely different message from it: We are allowing students who only [manage to] successfully pass a number of examinations to receive a diploma—independent of the quality of their actual education (to be defined below).

I remember a student who came up to me at the end of a statics exam while I was [still] teaching in the United States thirty-five years ago. She said to me, “No matter how many problems I have solved, I still find a few on your exam that I cannot handle.” She passed the course, but with a low grade—certainly not with an A or B.

Indeed, she had been training herself by learning (memorizing?) the solutions to a large number of different statics problems instead of educating herself [by] understanding—and systematically applying—the few underlying principles involved. Only the latter group—those who understand and show that they can systematically apply basic principles—have become educated in my view; they deserve the good grades; they have “seen the light.”

How does one test for education as opposed to training? I typically include a few problems on exams that have little to do with what is in the book or was discussed in class. When students ask me later, “Where was this problem treated?” my standard answer is simply, “It wasn’t, but if you had understood and applied the principles that were handled, then you could have solved the problem easily.”

Unfortunately, there were students in the United States thirty-five years ago—and today as well, I’m sure—who fail to become educated but are granted a university degree. (The same statement is also true on the east side of the Atlantic.) I have the impression that some university teachers here even concentrate on training rather than educating their students; this is indeed unfortunate. Their defense is something like: “If a student sees enough specific problems, he or she will ‘distill’ the basic principles and their application (education, thus) from them.” If this “ah-ha” step is not checked on exams, how can we determine if this objective has been achieved?

Colleagues in the United States have told me of another perhaps related problem that you have and we do not have here: When junior fails to perform well at a university, his daddy is on the phone to the university president reminding him that he has paid $30,000 for junior’s education this year; why is that not producing an acceptable result? You can bet that a group of such phone calls lead to waves within the faculty side of the university! This creates pressure to accept training in lieu of education as a satisfactory course or degree requirement.

I believe that the real leaders that we all need should be those who are educated rather than [just] trained. Those working on the BOK might keep this in mind.

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I also have a comment relevant to the misplaced discussion of teaching versus research. Felder showed in 1994 that there are very few persons indeed who are universal in that they are both excellent researchers and excellent teachers. A (former) dean at another Dutch engineering faculty once told me that he recognized this and for this reason he refused to evaluate individual members of a faculty subgroup, such as the team of mechanics teachers. Instead, he evaluated the team. If the team met the standards, it did not matter that some of the team might be concentrating on research while others were concentrating on quality teaching.

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I think there is a third item contributing to the decline mentioned in the article. I have missed a discussion of this facet within the BOK work so far. The attraction and retention of a sufficient number of qualified high school graduates will be easier if the teaching model used in the university is more or less an extension of teaching models and methods used in high schools. This needs some explanation!

Dutch pre-college education has changed radically during the last generation. Young people now enter the universities from a high school where they have had extensive experience working in teams and solving (at their own level) problems for which they must do some fact finding on their own; they come from an active learning environment. When these young people visit [some] universities and find lecture halls filled with 250 passive students they quickly decide to take their brains elsewhere.

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This is an excellent idea to publish these comments…. I would make one suggestion, and that is the article should have several recommendations or proposals as to how we can solve the problems identified in the articles. To help the discussion I will offer a proposed solution as follows.

As engineering is a “profession of practice,” we need to keep this in mind as the overarching guideline and principle that all the education activities must support. If we accept that concept then it follows that:Hope others will contribute to this and have more proposed solutions.