Guest Editorial: Engineering Education at the Crossroads

During the past 14 years the world saw economic expansion, financial crisis, and unrest in certain regions. The following 86 years will likely witness them repeating for varied reasons, which include emerging geopolitical conditions, population growth, internal and external migrations, further urbanization, competition for natural resources, changing climate, and energy mixes of nations. Longevity coupled with improved health care and birth rates suggests that the active world population will rise, contributing to continued economic expansion. The number of centenarians is projected to grow to 15 million from the current half a million. Future generations will be healthier, motivated, and economically active for periods longer than the current generations, upon formal tertiary education. In other words, the economically active life span upon graduation from university will be in the range of 50 to 60 years. It will no longer be unusual for people over 65 to be working full-time. Holding more than 10 jobs in a working career will be the new normal compared to the current average of two to three jobs during the career of an individual. More women will seek higher education and pursue careers. Moreover, the future generations are likely to experience rapid technological innovations that will shape living conditions and businesses. Hence, the education and skills they acquire at the tertiary institutions and lifelong learning (learn, unlearn, and relearn) are far more important than ever before. Countries and universities need to provide for the growing need for continual education. Environmentally friendly, autonomous transportation will be ubiquitous. Air, water, and soil are likely to become cleaner, with greater attention to the cradle-to-grave cycle of manufactured products. Bio-factories for medicines, nutritious food, and environmentally benign products will be the new norm. Advances in technologies and pursuit of sustainable development will slant energy mixes of nations toward renewables and lower resource consumption per capita. Widening income inequalities will likely erode social values. The proportion of single, two-person, or three-person families will increase around the world. As the families become nuclear, future generations will rely on public systems (universities, community organizations, cultural organizations, welfare groups, religious organizations, etc.) to develop character and acquire social values and interpersonal and life skills, which were acquired naturally in family settings in the case of earlier generations. The world will be increasingly multipolar, with the United States, the European Union, China, and India among the major geopolitical influencers. Innovation nodes will be globally distributed and interconnected. A high-quality educated workforce, scientific research capacity and capabilities, and an ecosystem conducive of innovative products, services, and governance are key enablers of competitiveness of countries. Around the world there are about 20,000 diverse universities annually graduating about 50 million students in a multitude of disciplines. The global comparison of universities emerged about 10 years ago. The world ranking lists were generated by comparing each university as a whole with others. More recently, the universities are compared at the individual discipline level. Increasingly, universities and engineering schools are pressured to move up in the rankings. Institutions around the world are chasing the top few universities, which take fewer students and primarily are research universities. This is leading to isomorphism of institutions and losing sight of the broader mission; that is, advancing social mobility and facilitating social engineering. It is important to recognize that students have diverse needs, and societies need diverse education pathways. Efforts should be aimed at developing incoming students to their full potential and evaluate the education providers based on the extent of value added. The 21st-century world needs university education to facilitate students’ disciplinary competence as well as social conscience and compassion. It is more important to differentiate education offerings and continually improving the education quality by benchmarking with peers and aspirant institutions meaningfully. Benchmarking-based ratings and accreditation or quality assurance serve a better purpose than mere rankings. Universities are to find ways and means to facilitate an interdisciplinary learning environment via flexible curriculum, which is necessary for future generations. The past two decades sawmassive expansion of engineering education in the emerging world and the wider access goal is realized. Unfortunately, half of the engineering graduates were not suitable for employment by industry and businesses. The reasons for this are several and vary among the engineering education providers. Mechanisms such as quality assurance, accreditations, rankings, ratings, Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ldrt. Drying Technology, 32: 1398–1400, 2014 Copyright # 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0737-3937 print=1532-2300 online DOI: 10.1080/07373937.2014.927696