Today at ISU
Cyclone News
Admissions

ISU IS SECOND IN NATION WITH ENGINEERING MINOR; FIRST CLASSES SPRING '07
 

Mark J. Kushner Professor and Dean

While the nation’s academic and political leaders struggle to find new ways of encouraging young Americans to study math, science, and technology, Iowa State’s College of Engineering is about to launch a new program its developers believe will face precisely the opposite challenge.

“I think the only problem we’re going to have is limiting who gets in,” says Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Alan Russell, one of the chief architects of the college’s proposed minor in engineering.

Russell’s confidence in the appeal of the minor to prospective students is well founded: in a January 2006 survey of non-engineering undergraduates, 40% of students responding expressed interest in the minor, and fully 68% said they would take at least one of the new courses envisioned for the program.

Support for the engineering minor, moreover, isn’t limited to students but extends as well to the business and industrial interests that will hire many of the program’s graduates. When presented to the College of Engineering’s Industrial Advisory Council, Russell says, the proposed engineering minor met with an overwhelmingly positive reaction. Their response, he observes, was hardly surprising.

“Industrial leaders often cite poor communications between their technical staff and their business and financial people as a problem,” Russell says. “Anything that can increase communications would be better for their companies and, in the long term, their shareholders.”

The program could be available as early as spring term of the 2006-2007 academic year. Limited initially to 50 non-engineering majors from across university departments, enrollment would expand to 100 students in the second and subsequent years of the program. Students enrolled in the engineering minor would be required to take 21 credits (seven courses), 15 of these in engineering, including nine hours of required courses. The program’s designers believe that the minor might add a semester to the typical student’s academic program.

Beyond a general appreciation of the role of engineering in society, students in the program will acquire practical skills such as simple calculation and estimation using the engineering method and the performance of cost-benefit and risk-benefit analyses. In addition, they will develop a fundamental understanding of the engineering design process and the limitations of engineering systems, as well as the interdependence of the economic, environmental, and sociological aspects of technological change.

Developed under the supervision of Dean of the College Mark J. Kushner, Iowa State’s engineering minor will be only the second such program offered in the United States. However, unlike Lehigh University’s first-in-the-nation effort, enrollees in Iowa State’s engineering minor will not be required to take upper-level math and physics courses as prerequisites.

That, says Russell, is “a pretty radical concept.” But it’s an approach the program’s developers feel is needed to include the widest possible variety of students. The absence of math and physics requirements, he notes, will make the curriculum even more challenging for both instructors and students, forcing them to communicate without recourse to many of the fundamental mathematical principles typically used to explain engineering concepts.

According to Kushner, it is just this level of communication between engineering professionals and non-engineers that is needed to address the many challenges facing society, the economy, and the environment.

“As much as we’d like more of our leaders to be engineers,” he acknowledges, “they’re probably not going to be engineers. They’re going to be the traditional occupations—law, business, the military. So we do ourselves a favor by ensuring that non-engineers who reach those levels of leadership have as sound a technical basis as possible.”

While some have expressed concern about funding for the program—every dollar that goes to educate non-engineers is a dollar not spent directly producing the new engineers America critically needs—Kushner notes that virtually every faculty member familiar with the program supports the fundamental rationale underlying the minor. Indeed, in arguing for the engineering minor, Kushner himself doesn’t hesitate to employ the types of cost-benefit analyses and long-range thinking that are key pedagogical elements of the program.

“The incremental value to our discipline of adding one more engineer is very high for that individual,” Kushner notes, “but for us as a discipline, it’s not that much value added. However, adding one more technically-educated person who goes to law school and ends up a senator making decisions on funding for the National Science Foundation? That’s a huge value added for us as engineers.”

And not just for engineers but society in general. “That’s what our land-grant mission is,” Kushner stresses: “to educate not only our own students, but students from other colleges; to create more opportunities for the students in our state.”