The complex dimensions of many issues faced by engineers require that they understand social and humanistic matters along with the technical, and communicate effectively and synergistically with persons having all sorts of backgrounds. This is especially true for matters of sustainability and energy supply. Engineering should therefore be built upon the foundation of a broad and liberal undergraduate education, with the professional degree being moved to the graduate level, as is the case for the other major professions. Another benefit of moving the degree level can be to delay the point...
Throughout the world, interest in gauging learning outcomes at all levels of education has grown considerably over the past decade. In higher education, measuring “learning outcomes” is viewed by many stakeholders as a relatively new method to judge the “value added” of colleges and universities. The potential to accurately measure learning gains is also viewed as a diagnostic tool for institutional self-improvement. This essay compares the methodology and potential uses of three tools for measuring learning outcomes: the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), the National Survey of...
The University of California, Riverside has raised its four- and six-year graduation rates significantly over the last decade while maintaining near-equity in graduation rates among the four major racial-ethnic groups and across socio-economic strata. The paper discusses campus policies and practices that have helped to produce these results. The campus has contributed to nearly equal graduation outcomes by maintaining strong network ties with parents in minority communities, by offering high levels of academic support and research opportunities to students from under-represented groups,...
Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less-lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which increasingly enforce GPA restriction policies that prohibit students with poor introductory grades from declaring popular majors. We investigate these GPA restrictions by constructing a novel 50-year dataset covering four public research universities’ student transcripts and employing a dynamic...
While international alliances among research universities are relatively well established, the challenges for the small liberal arts college to execute a meaningful global collaboration can be much more difficult, due both to the much smaller size of the institution, its more limited resources, and its smaller and more intimate culture centered on undergraduate teaching and learning. A new alliance of liberal arts colleges known as the Pacific Alliance of Liberal Arts Colleges (PALAC) was established in 2021 with the purpose to better articulate the global components of liberal arts...
Average-wage-by-major statistics have become widely available to students interested in the economic ramifications of their college major choice. However, earning a major with higher average wages does not necessarily lead individual students to higher-paying careers. This essay combines literature review with novel analysis of longitudinal student outcomes to discuss how students use average-wage-by-major statistics and document seven reasons that they may differ, sharply in some cases, from the causal wage effects of major choice. I focus on the ramifications of two-sided non-random...
There is strong interest in broadening engineering education, bringing in more liberal arts content as well as additional subjects such as economics, business and law, with which engineers now haveto be familiar. There are also cogent arguments for balancing against what is now the almost exclusively quantitative nature of the curriculum, adding more elements that relate to the actual practice of engineering, and structuring engineering education so as to provide multiple and later entry points, which should enable more informed career choices and make engineering attractive to a more...
Many societal trends and needs call for engineers to broaden their outlooks, have more flexible career options, and work closely and effectively with persons of quite different backgrounds. Yet the education and general orientation of engineers have been directed inward toward the profession, rather than outward toward the rest of society and the world. Engineering education should change to create a broader outlook and understanding in graduates and thereby engender capabilities for linkages and more likelihood of advancement into management and/or movement into other areas. The...
A “build it and they will come” approach to many university digitization initiatives has precluded systematic investigations of the demand for these resources. Those who fund and develop digital resources have identified the general lack of knowledge about the level and quality of their use in educational settings as pressing concerns. The purpose of our research was to map the universe of digital resources available to undergraduate educators in a subset of users in the humanities and social sciences (H/SS), and to examine how understanding use and users can benefit the integration of...
The instruction that we provide, the intellectual climate that we create, and the policy decisions that we make should all start with the question, "But will it improve students' learning?" Basic to any answer is the state of our knowledge about learning. A spate of recent research has resulted in comprehensive and lengthy reviews of surveys of research on student learning; the current model for coping with this information explosion is ever-tighter syntheses and distillations. These "principles" could in turn be summarized as a grand meta-principle that might say something like this: “...
