Ça ira: The need for reform of engineering education

All countries, but especially the member states of the OECD, require a supply of well-qualified engineering graduates to maintain their economic growth rates. Estimates of the required STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) graduates vary, from a 2012 report by President Obama?s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, that stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed in the US [1]. A key difficulty for Engineering is the continued gender imbalance, with only a minority of females taking the disciple, in a world where female students are performing better each successive year, and are now a majority of third-level students. This creates a conundrum: female students have the academic qualifications to get into engineering programmes, but lack the desire, whereas male students have the desire, but lack the qualifications. There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to persuade a greater percentage of females to take engineering programmes; this has been tried for many decades, with limited success. This paper looks at the other solution to the problem, the provision of courses to take students who do not meet the required professional level requirements to that point. This is something that has happened almost by chance in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). DIT was originally founded to provide engineering skills in the craft area, and has grown organically over the years to provide honours degree level and postgraduate programmes in many disciplines. Students who do not have the requirements for professional engineering programmes study technician programmes (Level 7 in the Irish framework) for three years, and then transfer to the third year of the professional engineering programme (Level 8). Results over the past decade have been good, with transfer students significantly more likely to achieve high quality degrees (2:1 or 1) than the students who left school with the better grades that got them directly into the Level 8 engineering programme. Our results demonstrate that it is better to alter the programmes to meet the students need, rather than to alter the behavior of students to meet the programme needs.