<p>I think the article skirts the issues. Honestly, I see there being bigger issues in the way high school operates than how our engineering curricula are structured.</p>
<p>These days, high schools seem to foster so much competition among “top students” and put so much emphasis on getting a high GPA and a great ACT/SAT so that you can get into that great school you always wanted, then many kids stress themselves out trying to do it only to get to college and find out that they are just in the middle of the pack. Meanwhile, throughout school they are bombarded by the notion that anything less than an A is simply not acceptable. They get to college and take a difficult major like the hard sciences or engineering and find out that there is so much more to know and that they aren’t even close to being prepared for it. Soon the B’s and C’s roll in and it is like their world is crashing down. No one ever tells them that you really only need a 3.0 to get a decent engineering job most of the time. I think I would have been discouraged too had I fallen into that trap.</p>
<p>Additionally, I think the model for high schools here is just plain bad as well. If a student has some idea that they want to go into a STEM field, they should be given the opportunity to forego one of those English literature classes in favor of maybe taking calculus earlier or physics earlier. Most of the time our high schools do such a terrible job of preparing students for a university mathematics or science class that it is no surprise that students start to fail and get disheartened. Personally, I feel like high schools should give students more opportunities to direct their high school educations in the last year or two towards their eventual college major. Get all the standard stuff out of the way early like usual, but then in the last year or two allow for more options for students to take extra literature- or science- or business-oriented classes as they apply to each student’s respective interests. I especially don’t think that every person in the US needs to take 13 years of English class. If by the time they are 16 they still don’t know what a subject and a predicate are and don’t know the difference between your and you’re, they probably never will anyway even if you force them to take 2 more years of it. That is at least two full-year classes that could be used preparing for college or the work force instead of learning something you either already know/will never really know and likely never will need to know.</p>
<p>Finally, many high school students have their hands held throughout their high school careers and don’t have nearly enough experience going out and learning things on their own. There are very few people, myself included, that started college with any kind of ability to go out and learn independently in a highly technical subject area. That is perhaps the biggest difference between classes in high school and college. In High School, your teacher basically holds your hand and directs you through the curriculum. In college, the professor presents the topics you need to know and learn, but any holes that you have left in your knowledge that you didn’t quite grasp from lecture are left to the student to fill (whether through office hours or reading the literature or any other number of methods). That is a daunting task for many new college students. I know that was a real adjustment for me. Adjustments to high school curricula to give at least some small taste of independent learning like that would probably go a long way toward helping students start off more prepared.</p>
<p>Engineering curricula are not perfect either, of course, but I don’t think they are too hard. On the contrary, I think many are right on and some are even too watered-down, particularly in terms of mathematics. I know I graduated from a good engineering school with a BS only to later find out just how terrible my math skills still were once I got to graduate school. Yes, you won’t often have to solve differential equations from scratch in the workforce as a BS-level engineer, but knowing that background math and the governing equations and where they come from can lead to an extraordinary degree of intuition that many engineers in my experience just don’t possess. Instead, as mentioned earlier, many engineers these days seem to just try and memorize equations and their applications rather than understanding where they come from and what they mean. That would certainly contribute to the trend of young STEM students losing sight of why they got into the major in the first place and rote memorization doesn’t lend itself to well to developing that intuition based on fundamentals either.</p>
<p>That leads me to my thoughts on what is wrong with engineering curricula. It seems to be twofold. First, many of them don’t engage students early or often enough to help keep their eyes on the end goal. By this I mean that while many (if not all) programs now have some sort of introductory engineering class your first semester that offers a preview of what is to come, they come too soon to really engage students on how the things they have learned can actually be applied. As it turns out, students have that class, then go through the grinder of all the tough classes before they hit the more interesting and applied things towards the end. What should happen, in my opinion, is that there probably ought to be a second, similar course taught during sophomore year for like 1 credit hour or something that takes what students have learned in the first few classes, such as calculus, physics and solid mechanics, and presents them with some real-world examples and projects of why they matter as part of the curriculum and eventually being a practicing engineer. Later classes would (and typically do) take care of this within the classes themselves, which is one reason why the attrition occurs almost entirely in the first two years. Keeping the students’ eyes on the big picture could help keep them from getting lost in the details of the seemingly overly-theoretical and abstract early classes. That would be a start.</p>
<p>The second thing is that many of the classes I took failed to really explain why it is that you have to learn the fundamentals and do the derivations of equations, while others just breezed through the fundamental equations and their derivations from first principles and went straight to the more applied and useful empirical equations (such as in convective heat transfer). I think that many engineering classes, especially the earlier foundational ones, ought to spend at least some time devoted to where the equations come from while making sure to be clear about why it is important to know even though practicing engineers will never have to derive the equations.</p>
<p>TL;DR?
Engineering curricula are not too difficult, and some are even probably too easy or applied than they ought to be. Instead, they just need to engage students and present the bigger picture earlier and more often than they do now. The bigger issue as far as I am concerned is in the high school preparation for college; a problem that exists for more than just STEM fields.</p>