Developing Global Competence in Engineering Students: U.S. and German Approaches

This article presents a U.S. and a German perspective on the challenges and strategies of each country in developing globally competent engineering professionals. It reviews U.S., German, and wider EU interests and strategies for attracting international students, as well as national and campus-based programs through which American and German engineering students can study abroad and gain international experience relevant to their future careers. The authors discuss the shared challenges faced by universities in both countries, and the need for further investments by government, industry and academia. oth the United States and Germany are challenged to graduate and retain enough wellqualified engineers and scientists to meet the needs of their own economies, without relying increasingly on international students and professionals. Each country is addressing this challenge in various ways, based on their higher education systems and the interests of government and the private sector. This article will address one element of the problem and response, the efforts by government and academia to attract and train international talent while also ensuring that its homegrown engineering professionals have the international perspectives that will make them competitive in the global market place. Both of the authors work for national level non-governmental organizations devoted to stimulating international exchange of academics and professionals, working closely with their own governments and the private sector. Neither is an engineer, so our article will focus mostly on how to enhance the “soft skills” increasingly demanded by industry and how to recruit and train a globally effective engineering workforce for the 21st century. We will present initiatives that each country has launched recently, and share some common concerns. Finally, we will offer some conclusions about the likely challenges going forward and how government, academia, and corporations may need to invest in new solutions. The United States: Maintaining a Leading Role Through Transnational Exchange With over 4,200 accredited institutions of higher learning and an enrollment of almost 18 million students (including over half a million international students), America’s higher education system is one of the largest and most flexible in the world, supported with an enviable mix of public and private funding for research and academic innovation. However, despite these advantages, U.S. higher education continues to face many challenges, including growing competition for international students, shrinking federal investment in basic research, rising infrastructure costs, and concerns about the employability of today’s graduates. To meet these many challenges, U.S. higher education continues to evolve, enabled by new technologies such as distance education, new funding paradigms (including an explosion of for-profit degree granting institutions), and expanded collaboration in teaching and research across disciplines and across borders. All of these will have substantial impact on the education of undergraduate and graduate students in the United States and around the world. A rapidly evolving international academic environment is also pushing American higher B 1 Blumenthal and Grothus: Developing Global Competence in Engineering Students Published by DigitalCommons@URI, 2008 Peggy Blumenthal and Ulrich Grothus Online Journal for Global Engineering Education 3.2 (2008) http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/ojgee 2 education to compete more vigorously for international talent. In Asia, especially in countries like China, Korea, and India, the expanding higher education sector is already affecting the numbers of their students enrolled not just in the U.S. but also in other major host countries such as the U.K., Australia, and Germany. Many foreign trained graduate students are heading home to build strong graduate programs in their home country universities, which over time may lessen the need to send large numbers abroad for professional training. These developments can be seen as a problem, a success, or a bit of both: they are the logical outcome of America’s definition of international students as “non-immigrants” who come here for training and then are required to return home. International education from the U.S. perspective was aimed at building home country capacity and, as such, is succeeding: Korea and Taiwan are just two examples where huge numbers of U.S.-trained academics have returned to teach or do research at home. With rapidly expanding economies, a growing urban middle class, and increased demand for educated managers, countries like China and India must follow the same educational path as Korea and Taiwan did, sending large numbers abroad to be trained while also expanding their home country higher education capacity to meet the needs of millions more students each year, a need that far outstrips the absorptive capacity of international host campuses. In Europe, reforms in the higher education system are also affecting America’s role in international education. The European Union has vigorously promoted and supported academic mobility within Europe, through which hundreds of thousands of students spend a semester or more in another European country on programs like ERASMUS, SOCRATES, and LEONARDO, in recognition of the fact that their future careers will require the ability to function in several European languages and cultures. This dramatic upsurge in student mobility has stimulated the growth of specialized personnel and infrastructure at European universities to manage student mobility, paralleling the international education professionals and structures on U.S. campuses. European higher education institutions are also developing “American-style” master’s degree programs, pushed by the Bologna process and the market, and they are reforming the higher education system in ways that will simplify the transfer of academic credits across borders. In the U.S., campuses are developing new strategies to serve the educational needs of students who do not travel to the U.S. to study, in addition to continuing to recruit large numbers of international students. Many “host” campuses are developing joint degree programs to be delivered locally at the home country university through a combination of distance learning, visiting faculty, and short-term stays abroad. Such programs provide students with access to international faculty and also encourage joint research collaboration among faculty. However, this model fails to transmit the full benefits of studying outside of one’s own culture, with full access to the educational resources of the host university’s faculty, libraries, and laboratories. Some higher education researchers raise concerns about whether the quality and level of graduate training and research conducted in these rapidly expanding home country institutions will be sufficient to sustain their high tech development needs. Challenge to America: Competitiveness in STEM While the developments cited above respond to the changing needs of national and regional economies, they can also be viewed as a challenge to American higher education’s long-held self-perception as the “destination of choice” for internationally mobile students and faculty. The ripple effect on U.S. higher education is increasingly noticeable, especially in key scientific and technical fields where international students are heavily concentrated, and American students significantly under-represented, especially at the graduate level. While STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduate programs in the U.S. are dominated by international students (foreign students made up 47 percent of all graduate enrolments in engineering in the U.S.), other countries are outpacing the U.S. in producing scientists and engineers: of all undergraduate degrees awarded worldwide in science and engineering, 72 percent were awarded outside the United States. Similarly, of all doctoral degrees earned worldwide in science and engineering, 78 percent were earned outside the United States. (Science and Engineering Indicators 2006). There is a growing acknowledgement among American educators and policy makers that scientific research is a global, rather than national, enterprise, and a realization that several countries already surpass America in the production of PhDs in key science/technology fields. This awareness calls for a “revolution” in higher education. These concerns grew 2 Online Journal for Global Engineering Education, Vol. 3 [2008], Iss. 2, Art. 1 http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/ojgee/vol3/iss2/1 Online Journal for Global Engineering Education 3.2 (2008) http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/ojgee Peggy Blumenthal and Ulrich Grothus 3 along with declines in the number of international students and scholars in U.S. universities: an overall drop of 2.4 percent was reported in Open Doors 20032004, the annual report by the Institute of International Education (IIE) on international academic mobility, followed by a 1.4 percent drop in 2004-2005, leveling off in 2005-2006. Larger percentage declines were notable in engineering and science fields. The drop was especially pronounced in the field of engineering, where numbers of incoming students from China and India declined sharply at some leading graduate schools. Those numbers have started to rebound, according to Open Doors 2007 (Bhandari and Chow, 2007) and recent surveys by the Council of Graduate Schools, but the issue has highlighted for key policy makers America’s vulnerability in terms of reliance on foreign-born STEM talent and possible shifts occurring as a result of international developments and U.S. responses. In the years following September 11, 2001, business and congressional leaders have joined academics in a proactive call to reform STEM education, strengthen U.S. competencies beginning at the pre-college level, and reduce