Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 891 de 957
directly reducing costs or indirectly through performance improvements), or were
working within prescribed budgets or just winning contracts.
While economy pervades engineering practice and economic constraints shape the daily
realities of engineering education, it is intriguing that discussions on engineering
education research seem to be silent on this issue. This is, perhaps, a reflection of recent
engineering education discourse that seems to have avoided a discussion on economics. A
companion paper in this conference argues that the value of engineering practice,
particularly the economic value, is one of several aspects of engineering practice absent
from curricula . The only mention found in a detailed study of
five major engineering education texts was a single brief remark attributed to Wellington
(1887).
This seems all the more surprising given the large changes that have taken place in
engineering education, not so much in terms of curriculum, but certainly in resourcing. In
the 1960s, during this author’s engineering studies, there were just 8 students for each
faculty member, and 70-80% of the faculty had significant industrial practice experience.
Today in the same institution, there are 30-50 students for each faculty member and less
than 10% have substantial industry experience. (Taking casual teaching assistants into
account, the official student-teacher ratio is significantly less, about 22 and 28 students
per teacher.) The majority of this author’s peers gained their professional credentials
under the guidance of state-owned engineering enterprises that invested significant
resources in educating novice engineers. The few state-owned enterprises still operating
today now outsource their engineering work to private firms where, mostly, there is
minimal formal guidance for engineering novices.
This paper reviews some recent contributions on the economics of engineering education
and higher education in general. A discussion on the costs and benefits of education soon
runs into the difficulty that, so far, there is no widely supported method to evaluate the
quality of learning. While teaching inputs can, to some extent, be quantified in terms of
time and direct costs, the resulting value in terms of student learning is difficult to assess.
For example, several studies have suggested that the workplace effectiveness of young
engineers is unrelated to their academic performance (e.g. Dahlgren, Hult, Dahlgren,
Segerstad, & Johansson, 2006; Lee, 1986, 1994; Newport & Elms, 1997). The length of time
or investment required for fresh graduates to become competent engineers could be
useful proxy measures related to the quality of their education. In Australia, research on
novice engineers in the early years of their careers has revealed that many rely on
graduate development programmes run by larger companies to make the transition from
graduate to competent professional. In this study, novice engineers reported that
practically everything they needed to know to accomplish their work had been learned in
the workplace (Trevelyan & Tilli, 2008). Many smaller companies are reluctant to employ
graduates because they lack the capacity to provide the intensive workplace education
needed by graduates. Studies by Bailey and Barley have shown that young graduate
engineers require up to an hour of one-on-one guidance daily (2010) yet they only studied
explicit learning interactions, not the informal and experiential workplace learning that
also takes place.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011