Acoustics Courses at the Undergraduate Level: How Can We Attract More Students?

Characteristics of the profession One means of studying the acoustics profession is to consider the ASA as a proxy for the professional demographics. The ASA was formed in 1929 as a scientific professional organization and it joined with three other such groups to establish the American Institute of Physics just two years later. Today the American Institute of Physics has ten member societies and 23 affiliated societies. Of these, the ASA is arguably the broadest in character, going far beyond a focus on physical matters related to sound. It is this characteristic of breadth that helps define us as a profession. It is visible in our journal, which presents scholarly articles on all aspects of acoustics from new musical instruments and animal communication to underwater sound propagation. Our breadth is also obvious at our conferences, which include presentations organized by our 13 technical committees, and in our standards, education, and outreach activities. Our members include physicists, biologists, engineers, architects, psychologists, musicians, physiologists, speech experts, and entertainment industry professionals. The types of jobs performed by our members include those from academia, government, consulting, manufacturing, and service industries—a greater breadth than normally found in the AIP member societies and broader than is typical of a single professional organization. Our unusual breadth as an organization is both a boon and a curse. It gives us a much greater chance to appeal to a wide variety of people. However, it also requires us to offer a bigger range of activities to meet the needs of different groups and this has often prompted significant discussion within the ASA. A good example of the tension our breadth creates is our standards activity. Many of the academic A study conducted in 1996 by Patricia Kuhl, then Vice President of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and Joseph Dickey, then Chair of the ASA Membership Committee, found that the ASA membership is predominantly male and aging. The ASA also is overwhelmingly comprised of majority populations (although we do not collect race/ethnicity data so it is not possible to provide hard data here). Students now make up 14 percent of the membership. While there is nothing terribly surprising in the results of the membership survey, it suggests that the largest professional society of acousticians in the world is not very diverse. It also raises a question as to whether the number of students entering the field is sufficient to sustain the profession in the face of a large number of anticipated retirements in the near future. Every profession has areas that rise and fall in popularity with advances in the field. In acoustics, for instance, the biologically-related areas have become far more popular of late than some of the more traditional, physics-based areas. Many disciplines go through significant cycling of popularity driven by funding, applications, and social issues or large events. Civil engineering, for instance, saw an up tick in the number of entering students shortly after the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001 and the same is anticipated now in reaction to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. It is also natural to see a general increase in stability in the numbers of people entering a field as it matures accompanied perhaps by a gradual decline in student numbers as they opt instead for emerging areas. However, as areas rise and fall, it is also true that groups of people can take actions to help sustain or grow them. It is in this context that we consider the role of acoustics education and focus on the undergraduate level. The premise of this article is that acoustics is perceived as a mature field with waning interest shown by students, and that one means to counter this trend is to create more courses at the undergraduate level designed to attract students to the profession. We examine this by consideration of the unique characteristics that define the acoustics profesACOUSTICS COURSES AT THE UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL: HOW CAN WE ATTRACT MORE STUDENTS?