NCEES Meets with EAC Members to Discuss Engineering Education
(From the NCEES publication LICENSURE EXCHANGE, June 2010, ISSN NO. 1093-541X, VOLUME 14, ISSUE 3 – PAGE 3)
NCEES Meets with EAC Members to Discuss Engineering Education
By DAVID L. WHITMAN, PH.D., P.E. – NCEES PRESIDENT
As we prepare for the Annual Meeting this August, education requirements for licensure remain a key concern for NCEES. At the May Board of Directors meeting in Salt Lake City, I updated my colleagues on recent developments with ABET. Specifically, I reported on a productive meeting held after the March meeting of the Participating Organizations Liaison Council (POLC), in which 18 members of the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of ABET, including David Holger, Ph.D., the ABET president, discussed the engineering education initiative with NCEES. I provided a history of how the Model Law 2020 requirements developed, and Mike Conzett, P.E., gave an update of the activities of the Engineering Education Task Force, which he chairs. This meeting was a direct result of the zone resolutions passed in 2007 and 2009 that encouraged NCEES leadership to work with ABET in any way that might lead to maintaining the connection between the ABET-accredited B.S. degree and entry into engineering licensure. The intent of the meeting was NOT to discuss the reasons why the professional societies are either in support of, opposed, or neutral to the education initiative, but rather to discuss ways that ABET might be able to make modifications to the B.S. degree that would allow it to remain the “gold standard” with regard to licensure.
ABET leadership agrees with the Council that the body of knowledge of engineering has expanded and that no one should be satisfied with all aspects of the current status of engineering education.
However, President Holger noted two concerns. First, there is no consensus among the member societies of ABET on how to address engineering education. Second, the question of how much of the expanded body of knowledge should be covered in an educational environment versus the experiential environment has not been answered.
An important message from ABET is that although the organization has not taken a position on the education initiative, it is able to adjust its process if that is the will of the ABET member societies. ABET, like NCEES, is a member-driven organization, and the licensure process is just one of its concerns. Other stakeholders include state legislatures, parents, and university leadership. Since NCEES and the professional societies are ABET member societies, I believe that we should continue to work with the EAC to incorporate appropriate changes into the ABET criteria. However, this will be a very slow process. There is a clear difference in the perspectives of licensing boards, disciplinary professional societies, and engineering faculty, and many of the latter are not prepared to overhaul the accreditation criteria for B.S. degree programs.
Needless to say, we didn’t leave the meeting with a promise that ABET would immediately modify the accreditation criteria for B.S. degree programs, but we did get them to agree to continue this discussion in their EAC meetings while keeping in mind the connection between an ABET-accredited B.S. degree and licensure.
