THE FUTURE OF ENGINEERING ENROLLMENT: MORE FEMALE STUDENTS

By Daodao Wang

In March’s databyte we looked at high school graduates and the degrees awarded in engineering disciplines since 2006 and made projections to compare the two numbers in the next 10 years. In this month’s databyte we project the growth of women pursuing an undergraduate engineering degree.

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) provides the high school graduate data from 2002 and projections through 2031 for research purposes. ASEE’s Profiles of Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges survey tracks the number of full-time engineering freshman students, and we estimate that each year 87 percent of engineering students enrolled as freshmen are first-time full time students¹. According to Profiles data, female participation in undergraduate engineering has increased from 16.62 percent in 2006 to 22.27 percent in 2016. If we assume that female undergraduate engineering participation continues to grow at the same rate, we estimate that by the year 2028 women will make up 31.42% of all incoming first-time full time students entering an engineering degree program as freshmen.

The enrollment gap between female and male students in undergraduate engineering decreased by around 17 percent, down from 66.76 percent in 2006 to 55.46 percent in 2016. If our projection is correct, the gap will continue to shrink to 37.16 percent in 2028.

¹ Please refer to ASEE Retention Survey White Paper at: http://aeir.asee.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2017-Engineering-by-the-Numbers-3.pdf

Table 1. First-time, Full Time Freshmen Enrollment in Engineering and High School Graduates by Gender, 2006–2028 (projection)

Figure1. First-time, Full time Freshmen Enrollment in Engineering by Gender, 2006–2028 (projection)

The demand for mechatronics engineers is huge across the global manufacturing market. Today’s modern world offers a broad range of products that incorporate software and electronics components, making mechatronic product development a hot commodity.

Most technology-based universities now offer degrees in mechatronics engineering. These programs embrace application projects that fuse mechanical, electronic, computer, systems and control engineering disciplines.

Some examples of the kinds of mechatronic projects engineering students are working on right now at universities around the globe include: Components for hybrid and electric vehicles, robotic systems, driver assistance systems, green technology, electric motors and drives, medical devices, etc.

If your university is working on a project that involves model-based development and mechatronics, you should consider Advanced Control Education (ACE) Kits available through dSPACE.

ACE Kits are combined packages of high-performance hardware and software tools for developing and testing mechatronic control systems in classrooms and research projects.

The tools in an ACE Kit make it easy to visualize even the most complex open and closed loop controls, from the initial draft using block diagrams to the final online optimization of the controller in real time.

ACE Kit software works in a standard Microsoft® Windows® environment. The provided tools automatically migrate your control system design from the Simulink® environment to dSPACE real-time systems in a matter of seconds, and experimenting and analyzing system design is simple.

ACE Kit hardware ranges from systems with a fixed number of I/O to modular, expandable systems that can be fully customized.

With an ACE Kit, you can introduce your students to the latest development tools and methods that are being used by real-world industry.

To request more information on exclusive offers for academia, click here.

III. POLITICAL HOTLINE

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AN ENGINEERING CONUNDRUM

What will we do when machines do everything?

By Aditya Johri

On a recent research trip to India I fell into conversation with the owner of a small shop whose primary business was serving mobile phone customers. In a country where most customers pay as they go for their mobile phone use, he helps customers pick from among dozens of available plans while also selling handsets. I was in India collecting data for a study on how mobile technology is allowing people without bank accounts to become a part of the formal financial system. Access to banks is something we often take for granted in the West, but a majority of the world’s population is still unbanked. This means people are deprived of regular savings, credit at competitive rates, and an easy mechanism to transfer money. It costs more for the unbanked—who are poorer to begin with—to obtain credit and send money to others.

Until lately, the shop owner was an important intermediary in the same mobile ecosystem that affords his unbanked customers a modest boost in their financial clout. But when I asked how technology was changing his business, he said digitization, especially online transactions, had increased the use of mobile phones overall but had actually harmed his livelihood. Customers could now directly recharge their phones online, without using him as the middle man. The more comfortable they became with online transactions, the less they came to his shop. Increasingly, he said, digitization and online transactions were hurting small-business owners, cutting revenues for many of them by up to 50 percent. “If I don’t do this,” he said, “what will I do?”

His question captures the essential dilemma of a world that is digitizing at such an exponential pace that even people, like the shop owner, with a niche in the technology industry see a threat to their jobs. What will happen when a lot of what people do now is done by machines (in some form or another)? Many scholars and strategists see this problem as one of technological development taking its natural course and argue that technology will also provide the solution. They point to the mechanization of the farm and the industrial revolution as similar phases of technological development that eventually generated more jobs. Others predict fundamental change as digitization and computation software allow machines to perform actions and to respond to inputs in ways that were inconceivable not long ago. This means less dangerous work will be performed by humans, but humans will have a lot less to do. Even if new challenges come up, machines will learn to deal with them. We are in the initial phase of this transformation. Right now, creation of jobs through services such as Uber and Lyft and of revenue through Airbnb look like positive developments. Yet, in the near future, when self-driving cars and trucks become commonplace, a lot of these jobs will cease to exist. Retail and warehouse sectors will need a lot fewer people than are hired now.

The solutions offered to date are mostly along the lines of training—especially in technical skills, so that people can take advantage of emerging opportunities and prepare for ones that we cannot foresee at the moment. The other solution, the subject of an experiment in Finland, is to provide everyone a basic income so that basic needs are fulfilled and a lack of employability is not a burden. These are acceptable solutions to some degree, but they do not take into account that billions of people across the world, especially in Asia and Africa, are really young—for instance, 50 percent of India’s population is less than 25 years old—and are looking not just for jobs but a purpose in life.

The paucity of thinking around this topic is a challenge for engineering educators, since a lot of our domain research is responsible for creating this conundrum in the first place. As an example, 3-D printing has definitely made design and production more universal, but it has also made it more digital and easy to do with fewer and fewer people. We are at the cusp of producing more and more things for people who are employed less and less. What do we teach in this scenario and how do we impart knowledge whose half-life can be years or months or even weeks, and to what avail?

Aditya Johri is an associate professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology at George Mason University. 

KEYS TO STUDENT SUCCESS: SUPPORT AND INTEGRATION

A new survey tool opens a path to more reliable theories in engineering.

By Walter C. Lee, Allison Godwin and Amy L. Hermundstad Nave

In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly been called upon for answers related to the success of undergraduate students. In response, educators and researchers have emphasized outcomes and particular theories of student development—such as student retention, engagement, and involvement. However, student development theories are often disconnected from engineering education practice, failing to consider the diverse backgrounds of students and programmatic approaches aimed at helping students be successful. There is thus a need for engineering-specific theories and constructs to advance our understanding of student development and, ultimately, success in their engineering pathways.

To help meet this need, we developed the Engineering Student Integration Instrument (ESII), a new way of understanding and measuring student integration that draws on a recently developed model of co-curricular support (MCCS) for undergraduate engineering students. Integration traditionally refers to a student’s cultural fit within an institution and is sometimes equated with cultural assimilation. As a result, it may not accurately reflect the experience of underrepresented students, or those who do not fit within the dominant culture. In developing the ESII we drew from the MCCS because it interprets integration differently, focusing on whether a student has the awareness of and access to the resources necessary to be successful. It focuses on the support necessary for students to persist in engineering as opposed to their ability to adopt the values of the institution.

In developing the ESII, we provide the community with a new tool that can be used to explore students’ interactions with engineering faculty, staff, and other students, as well as their academic performance, participation in extracurricular activities, and professional development. We created survey items by drawing on a data set of actual student responses about how they benefited from support provided by student support centers, such as minority engineering programs (MEPs) and women in engineering programs (WEPs). These responses, which came from a diverse group of students from multiple universities, were transformed into survey questions. Before finalizing the survey, we sought feedback on phrasing, formatting, and validity from researchers, students, and a college administrator responsible for assessment.

To collect validity evidence, we administered the survey to engineering students at a large East Coast public university. A total of 586 students responded. Overall, the sample was representative of the racial and ethnic demographics of the engineering population at the university, although the proportion of female respondents was slightly higher than their representation among the school’s engineering students. Using the students’ responses, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis on half of the data and a confirmatory factor analysis on the other half. This approach allowed us to examine the structure and the fit of the developed instrument.

Our results showed the appropriateness of the ESII for measuring the integration of undergraduate students in engineering. The instrument is easy to administer and provides researchers with a more comprehensive and multidimensional way to measure student integration. Future studies should test the use of the ESII in other contexts, such as community colleges and nonresidential universities, to determine the extent to which these constructs are transferable. It is our hope that the ESII will increase the focus on the support necessary for students to persist, not on their ability to adopt the values of the institution.

Walter C. Lee is assistant director of research in the Engineering Education Department at Virginia Tech, where Amy L. Hermundstad Nave is a Ph.D. candidate. Allison Godwin is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. This article is excerpted from “Development of the Engineering Student Integration Instrument: Rethinking Measures of Integration,” which appears in the January 2018 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education.

VI. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS

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