Written by Mark Rosenzweig.
Having visited many campuses over the years, and spoken to countless chemical-engineering students at AIChE and other meetings, we don't detect any real change in the eagerness, earnestness, and enterprise of students. There definitely are, however, differences in how well students are prepared for college.
To paraphrase Mort Denn, editor of our sister publication, AIChE Journal, and a professor at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, who recently offered some telling reflections on what he has witnessed over the last 25 years:
The current generation of chemical engineering students — with, of course, some exceptions — cannot communicate effectively. Faculty members have always complained about students' written and oral presentations, but the deterioration over these last 25 years has been profound. Skill in communication is closely tied to the way in which an individual formulates and approaches problems, and the failure of schools to emphasize writing has had a major impact on technical education and professional practice.Many chemical-engineering departments are trying explicitly to address this problem by superimposing stringent requirements for technical writing in engineering courses; some schools even provide special technical-writing courses. A survey by CEP (see "Update" in this issue) details some of the initiatives being taken. At CEP, we will try to do our part in helping engineers improve their communication skills. For instance, the first of a series of articles on giving a good technical presentation appears in the next issue.
Unfortunately, the changes go well beyond the loss of proficiency in communication. Here too, Mort Denn undoubtedly speaks for many educators in pointing up two other key factors:
It used to be taken for granted by faculty members and students alike that most learning was accomplished by reading difficult material and working through the logical problems. Today's students, though no less hard working than their parents, do not wish to read; they expect the learning process to consist of doing — problem solving, for example. They have come to expect a less tortuous path to knowledge, and no such path exists in chemical engineering.
The reason for this change, many believe, is the "Sesame Street" approach to learning in primary and secondary education. It assumes that students have limited attention spans and will absorb knowledge only if presented with it in short, sprightly quanta.
Beyond this, I see another problem with current chemical-engineering students. Mental arithmetic and quantitative estimation were valued a generation ago. Today, even the concept is foreign to students. The replacement of the slide rule and analog computer (both of which require an appreciation of magnitudes) by the calculator and digital computer (which do not) has led to a loss of quantitative intuition, and the engineering profession is much the worse for this. Students value precision in problem solving but typically show an alarming unawareness of accuracy.
Efforts by engineering schools and by the chemical process industries to deal with the challenges that these changes pose are, of course, welcome. What our profession is seeing, however, is only part of a far larger problem. And the signs, so far, certainly are not encouraging that American society is really prepared to come to grips with it.
Interesting to note this was almost 30 years ago.
Mark Rosenzweig is still active in the ChE world and is still writing about how to make students and newly graduated better. Here is an editorial from 2018.
