Cressida

"For example, your stance would be that if a high school dropout manages to pass the Bar exam, he should be allowed to legally practice law, right? "

I would agree with the above statement and say the same thing should apply to all professions that have been mentioned above. This would put people on more equal footing and provide opportunities to level the playing field. Sort of along the same thing as adding "diversity" to the college campus.

ken285

You can require just an examination to pass, but those people who take this route will never make it in their professions. If you're looking to hire a lawyer, would you want one with a degree or without a degree? If you're looking for a doctor, would you want one who spent years in school learning and practicing? or just someone who passed a set of exams once? Don't know about you, but give me the one with the degree.

Would you want an engineer to design a bridge with no formal education in the field? I sure hope not.

Passing an exam alone doesn't demonstrate competence and knowledge.

quicksilver40133

It can be argued that the goods and services provided by engineers are qualitatively different from those provided by medical professionals. I believe that these qualitative differences do in fact lead to the difference. I don't see law and medicine as being anywhere near what engineering is. Don't get me wrong, they're not easy. But they are different socially, economically, etc. Just because it was done with them doesn't mean it should be done with engineers. You need a better reason than "why not?" to change something that works fine as it is.

And I think that examinations are fundamentally flawed, conceptually. I say, hire anybody who looks like they might do alright, and start them off with minimal responsibility. Then, after they demonstrate that they're competent, give them bigger and more far-reaching responsibilities. Fortunately, this is already how it is done, since the world is a sane place and this is the sane thing to do. On a side note, getting a degree does not demonstrate competence or knowledge, either. A degree is just a bunch of examinations.

I dislike the idea of making a master's education the minimum requirement for engineering. I believe the general requirement should remain a bachelor's. Does this mean I think master's degrees are worthless? No. Does it mean I deny that some associate's degree holders would make better engineers than bachelor's holders? No. But if one must generalize, I feel that a bachelor's degree is what the standard entry-level requirement should be, now, in the US.

ken285

I'll agree with you on that, but if you have a degree (passed many many exams), you're more likely to be competent than if you pass one exam. This is the reason engineers don't get licensed immediately after getting a degree; 4 years of experience is a fairly good indicator of competence. You'd be fired before that period is up if you weren't good at what you do.

I don't think we should get rid of the exams either, as they standardize the licensing process.

sakky

Such a point can be argued, but has not convincingly been done so by anybody yet. I would be particularly interested in hearing how the goods and services provided by engineers are really that different from those provided by, say, architects.

But that's not the point you raised previously. You stated that there would have been market forces that would have implemented change. I question that. Specifically, I question exactly what market forces impelled other professions to upgrade their educational standards.

Well, I don't know about that. Is that how things are really done in the real world? Let's be honest. Most new law graduates have minimal experience with real-world law. Yet the fact of the matter is that the most elite law firm positions, the most prestigious and powerful judicial clerkships, and the most desirable nonprofit law jobs are going to be given to the guys who graduated at the top of their class from the top law schools, not to the guys with many years of practicing experience. Let's face it. Even if you've been out there practicing law for 30 years, you're still not going to get a judicial clerkship at the Supreme Court. That sort of job is likely to instead go to the guy who graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Law. To be a Supreme Court judicial clerk is to be in a position of tremendous responsibility, as what you do can potentially affect legal outcomes throughout the country.

Similarly, I can think of some engineering grads from MIT and Stanford who were immediately placed in positions of tremendous responsibility, more so than some other engineers who have decades of experience (but who had graduated from low-ranked schools and ended up working in companies that are not highly meritocratic and don't offer many opportunities for advancement).

Perhaps the best examples of all can be found in the professorial ranks. Let's face it. Even in the professional disciplines, many, probably most, newly-hired professors don't have significant real-world work experience. In fact, many of them have none at all. For example, consider Erik Demaine, who was hired to be a professor of EECS at MIT at the age of 20, the youngest professor in the history of MIT. He's never actually held a full-time job as an actual engineer in industry a day in his life. Yet he's now teaching engineering students. In short, Demaine has been put in a position of tremendous responsibility despite never having actually worked as an engineer in the real world.

http://erikdemaine.org/cv.pdf

Nor is Demaine a peculiar case. Many (probably most) of the engineering professors at MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and the other top engineering schools have never actually worked as real-world engineers. Granted, these profs are all brilliant researchers and academics. Yet the fact remains that they have little real-world engineering experience but are still responsible for teaching undergrads, most of whom will end up as real-world engineers.

See above. The upshot is that it seems to me that some people out there do indeed land positions of high responsibility despite having minimal practical experience.

I would still argue that for your position to be consistent, you should then also believe that a bachelor's degree should be sufficient for medicine or law, or at least, that a prior undergrad education should not be necessary before commencing studies in medicine or law. Why not? That's what happens in numerous European countries. For example, many people in the UK go to medical school straight after completing high school, without ever having attended any undergraduate program. Yet I am not aware of information that would lead me to believe that British doctors are conspicuously incompetent or undereducated. Are the health care challenges so different between the US and the UK that US doctors need a prior undergraduate education, but British doctors do not? I think that would be hard to argue.

That gets to my original point, which is that I am not aware of any market forces that would drive one nation to implement one sort of professional training system, but another to implement a different system. Whatever forces that would drive such differences would more likely be organizational and political, not market.

Corbett

In some states, it is still possible to become a lawyer without a law degree. But to do so, you need to get several years of work experience under a practicing attorney or judge (basically "apprenticeship").

Suppose you have a choice between two attorneys who just passed the Bar Exam. One qualified after years of practical experience, but never attended law school. The other went to law school, but has never worked as an attorney in the Real World (the Bar Exam, unlike the PE exam, can be taken immediately after you graduate, and usually is). Given this choice, I would prefer to hire the unschooled lawyer with real-world legal experience, rather than the educated lawyer with none.

Abraham Lincoln qualified for the Bar by apprenticeship, and was considered a pretty good lawyer before entering politics. Even today, there is at least one State Supreme Court Justice (Hon. Justice Skoglund in Vermont) who has no formal legal education. Sure, I'd hire lawyers like that.

ken285

I agree with you on that. However, my comparison was between two lawyers with no professional experience, but both having passed the BAR exam.

quicksilver40133

So where do you stand, sakky? This is an opinion thread, and it seems like all you're good for is debunking other people's opinions.

I don't necessarily believe that doctors or lawyers need the *extra* education. Why they decided to enhance requirements, I don't really know or care. I don't think the requirements should be arbitrarily changed. Give me a good reason - and no, professional societies having prestige-hungry wet-dreams is not a good reason - and then we can talk. I've not seen a single good reason for doing it in this thread. Perhaps you can refresh my memory, though?

ken285

I don't feel the bachelor's degree covers everything you need to know to start off as an engineer. My undergrad institution actually pretty much squeezed 1/2 a master's degree into our bachelor's degree; instead of requiring the standard 120 credits, I needed 135 credits to graduate. And you know what? It's still not enough to be honest. There were a few big topics on the discipline-specific section of the FE exam which we did not cover (though we were good for general section). I'm at a different institution now for a MS, and I look at their undergrad curriculum and I see the same problems.

There's really nobody to blame though because I couldn't really say that one course could be replaced by another in the curriculum and students would be better off. It's just simply too much to squeeze into 8 semesters. The engineering world won't fall apart if the educational requirements aren't changed, but it will certainly benefit if they do.

Corbett

It is possible (though uncommon) in certain states to obtain a professional license without going to professional school. In California, for example, you can qualify for the Bar exam without a law degree, or for the PE exam without an engineering degree.

But in all such cases that I know of, the state boards demand a lot of supervised professional work experience -- much more than you would need if you had a degree -- in order to qualify for the licensing exam. It's not a "shortcut". In effect, you are still required to get an appropriate education; however, the presumption is that you get it on the job, rather than in the classroom.

So in practice, you can't compare degreed and non-degreed lawyers, and assume that they both have no professional experience. If a non-degreed lawyer has passed the Bar (and it does happen, though rarely), then that individual must have had several years of approved prior work experience in order to qualify.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that engineers, lawyers, or other professionals should be licensed without either education or experience. If someone who wants to take a professional licensing exam without a formal degree, then it seems reasonable to require a long history of supervised work experience first.

Corbett

This is a bit off-topic, but in this situation, you might not want to take the discipline-specific section of the FE exam. If you're good for the general section in the AM, then simply take the general section in the PM as well.

sakky

Uh, no, I haven't debunked your opinion. Rather, I have debunked some of the rationale that you used to defend your opinion. Specifically, you stated that market forces would serve to impel professions to increase educational requirements, yet the evidence indicates otherwise. I am not aware of any market forces that caused the law profession or the medical profession in the US to boost its requirements. I am certainly not aware of any good rationale for why those same forces would serve to boost such requirements only in the US, but not other countries.

The bottom line is that if you still want to believe that engineering should not increase its educational requirements, that's fine. That's your opinion and everybody has a right to their own opinion. But if you then want to justify your opinion, you have to make sure that your justification holds water. I am not aware of any market forces that serve to enhance educational standards. If you are aware of some, please do tell.

As far as where I stand, like I said before, I haven't taken a stance. I personally haven't come to a decision about whether increasing engineering requirements would be good or not.

Well, first off, I don't think the reasons necessarily have to be "good". They just have to be effective. For example, again, for whatever reason, good or not, medicine and law were able to enhance their educational requirements. It seems to me that you dislike that change and I infer from your posts that you probably wish that the US medical educational system was more like that in Europe (in which you can attend medical school right after high school with no need for any intervening undergrad education whatsoever). Hey, that's fine. But at the end of the day, somehow, whether for good reasons or not, the AMA was able to increase educational requirements for doctors.

ken285

That's exactly what I did, but I'm using the topics on the exam as a standard on what should be included in the curriculum.

Corbett

My crystal ball is no better than anyone else's, but here's how I see the situation playing out over the next 10+ years:

(1) at least some US states -- probably not all -- will adopt the current NCEES model law, which calls for the MS degree (or BS + additional credits) as the educational minimum for PE licensure. Since civil engineers typically need to become licensed, the MS degree will become the de facto first professional degree for civil engineers in at least some states. Some engineers in other disciplines, like power or HVAC engineers, will be affected as well.

(2) In response to this change, ABET will broaden its accreditation policies. Traditionally, ABET has focused on accrediting BS programs -- they don't ordinarily accredit MS programs, except at graduate-only institutions. This will likely change, and the ABET-accredited MS degree will become commonplace. Same thing happened in architecture, where NAAB accredits both B.Arch. and M.Arch. programs.

(3) At least some schools will drop their BS programs in engineering in favor of accredited MS programs. The undergrad programs at such schools will become "pre-engineering", with less technical focus and more liberal arts electives. Some schools (Harvard, Dartmouth) already offer non-accredited engineering BA degrees as alternatives to the ABET BS.

Again, this would follow the pattern set by architecture. Many prestigious schools only offer "pre-architecture" at the undergrad level, with the M.Arch. offered as a professional degree in grad school.

(4) The professional BS degree option will not disappear, as other schools will continue to offer ABET BS programs to undergraduates. This option will be more common at less prestigious institutions; e.g. second-tier state schools, "polytechnic" schools, "A&M" schools, etc. Once again, look at architecture.

(5) Overall, the changes will be good for engineering. More people with broader backgrounds will be able to pursue engineering careers. For example, science and math majors will enroll in engineering grad schools in their 30s and 40s, just as older students commonly go to law or business school. And the narrower, but shorter, professional BS path will still be available for those who want it. There would be more options for prospective engineers, not fewer.

seesys

So if this professional degree thing goes into effect, would it make a difference if you got a MS in CivE versus a MEng in CivE?