Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2008, 47, 1-6
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Chemical Engineering Education in Post-Industrial America Chemical engineering education began with the rise of industrialization in America and the growing demand for products manufactured through chemistry, to prepare students for challenging and rewarding careers, and to create new knowledge to support these demands. In the last 40 years, the United States has entered the deindustrialization phase and has required less manufacturing labor each year, because of increasing manufacturing labor productivity and international outsourcing. More than half of the engineers in the United States have already migrated to work in service industries, such as finance, health care, entrepreneurship, and business services, which provide very satisfying and challenging careers. Chemical engineering already has a highly admired curriculum and degree program that should be fine-tuned to remain relevant to the coming decades; moreover, they should also be promoted beyond professional education to teach what is useful in chemical processing, but also as liberal education for all ambitious students for other career paths. Industrialization and Engineering Education Before the Industrial Revolution, most people earned their livelihood through gathering, animal herding, fishing, and farming. Only a few skilled workers or engineers were needed for the control of flood and irrigation, for the construction of roads and bridges, and for military weapons and fortifications. The Industrial Revolution, from 1780, led to power generation for textile mills, railroads, steamships, and vast expansions of the demand for knowledge and skilled workers in energy, material, and machinery. Engineering education rose in that period to service these needs. Since 1965, America has entered the post-industrial phase, where employment in manufacturing continues to decline, altering the job market for engineering graduates. A nation’s structure of production is usually divided into (1) primary production (which consists of agriculture, forestry, fishery, mining, and other activities that wrest resources from nature), (2) secondary production (which consists of manufacturing industry and construction, which transform resources into goods of even greater utility), and (3) services (which consist of all the other activities that do not create goods, such as trade, transportation, government, finance, education, and health care). These three categories are often called simply (and less accurately) agriculture, industry, and services.1 Figure 1 shows the historic record of the United States from 1810 to 2002, as a plot of the percentage of labor that is engaged in agriculture versus the percentage of labor that is engaged in industry.2-5 In the year 1810, agriculture employed 84% of American labor, and industry employed 8%; therefore, the * To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel.: 609-2585618. Fax: 609-258-0211. E-mail address:
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remaining 8% were employed in services. The first American civilian engineering school was the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which was founded in 1824. The Morrill Act of 1862 was signed to establish the land grant universities, amid the growing importance of this industry. Over the next 145 years, the industry portion of labor rose to 35% in 1965, but declined steadily until it reached 21% in 2002. The belief is that the agriculture and industry portions of labor cannot shrink to zero in the next century, but there is uncertainty in regard to what the irreducible minimum values are. This does not mean that the products of agriculture and industry would cease to be important in the future: it means that, other than a few dynamic growth areas, fewer people will be employed and challenged for routine maintenance in mature areas. Because of the fact that the founding and prosperity of engineering schools were established during the growing importance of industrialization, would symmetry suggest that engineering schools would fall with deindustrialization? America is not unique in this historic trajectory from agriculture to industry, and then to services. Figure 2 shows the contemporary world labor structure in the year 2000, which shows a great similarity.4,5 Somalia in 2000 is close to the U.S. position in 1810, Turkey today is close to the U.S. position in 1879, and Germany is close to the U.S. position in 1965. This industrialization among the high-income nations is then followed by a plunging trend in deindustrialization, reaching a minimum of 19% for Hong Kong, which is perhaps the most deindustrialized high-income nation today, with the except of Vatican City, which is totally devoted to services. We all know the reasons for these shifts in the national structure of production: (1) Changing consumer demands, as a consequence of increasing wealth, as low-income families concentrate spending on the basic necessities of food and clothing, and middle-income families begin to spend more on financial security, education, and health care. The importance of services over goods becomes even stronger in high-income families, where private education, foreign travel, and cultural events become more prized than luxury goods. (2) Increasing productivity improvements in agriculture and industry, so that fewer and fewer employees are required to produce each unit of food and product. This is in contrast to the more sluggish increase of productivity improvement in services: we, as a society, demand there shall be no more than 15 students to 1 teacher in a class, and we, as a society, require the full and undivided attention of a surgeon and his staff at the operating table. Salt and sulfuric acid remain important in the modern world, but they do not provide many satisfying careers for graduate engineers. (3) Outsourcing of industry to low-income nations means fewer manufacturing plants here. If everything sold at typical
10.1021/ie0713238 CCC: $40.75 © 2008 American Chemical Society Published on Web 11/29/2007
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Figure 1. Graphical depiction of the historic evolution of the U.S. labor structure, from 1810 to 2002. The data from Kuznets2,3 (from 1810 to 1965) is given as red squares, and the data from the World Development Indicator4 (from 1960 to 2002) is given as blue diamonds. The sum of the percentage of labor in agriculture, industry, and services add up to 100%.
national discount retailers is made in China, then there are fewer manufacturing jobs in the United States. The United States has been running an international balanceof-payment deficitsone of more imports than exports for all goods and servicessfor many years. In 1986, the Amundson Report6,7 mentioned that, while the U.S. deficit for all goods and services was 150 billion dollars, the chemical industry still managed to have a surplus of 10 billion dollars. A recent issue of Chemical & Engineering News8 has shown that, in 2006, the deficit in all manufacturing has grown to 817 billion dollars, but the once-flagship chemical industry also had a deficit of 4.2 billion dollars. There are different goals for liberal education and professional education. A liberal education takes the elitist view and teaches general knowledge and subjects that are due to perceived intellectual truth and rigor, which are good for enlightened citizens for any future pursuits. Geometry may have originated with the need to keep track of the sizes of farm areas subject to the Nile flood, but became the queen of sciences fit for philosophers and kings. A professional education takes the utilitarian view and prepares students for useful specialized practices, such as theology, law, and medicine. In a chemical engineering curriculum, we try to achieve sufficient overlap
between what the faculty teaches and what the graduates will need later, at least for entry-level positions. However, we cannot teach every useful trade subject, because one curriculum must serve a multiple of career paths, and we cannot have a specialist on our faculty for each trade. There are no good records of engineering education in the ancient world, and we can surmise that people learned to build the pyramids and the Great Wall by apprenticeship, learning from the experienced masters. Engineering education in the formal sense was started in France with the establishment of the EÄ cole des Ponts et Chausse´es in Paris during 1747, to build bridges and roads for the state. The more-famous EÄ cole Polytechnique was founded in 1794 by Lazar Carnot and Gaspard Monge, for the training of army engineers, especially for the artillery that was needed by Napoleon. Famous graduates include Gay-Lussac (1797), Sadi Carnot (1812), and Poincare´ (1873). The first engineering program in the United States was the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which was founded in 1802; it was modeled after the French model and used French textbooks in mathematics. The first civilian engineering school was the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which was founded in 1824. Today, our chemical engineering education system derived from the founding of the first program at the Massachusetts
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Figure 2. Graphical depiction of the worldwide labor structure in 2000. The information from many nations are given in blue diamonds. The red squares that are connected by a dotted line represents the Kuznets data2,3 for the United States from 1810 to 1965.
Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1888, by teaching industrial chemistry of inorganic chemicals. The current core curriculum included (i) the introduction of unit operations in 1923 in the textbook that was authored by Walker, Lewis, and McAdams, which introduced the first paradigm of scientific principles of process equipment that are widely applicable; (ii) the introduction of transport phenomena in 1960 in the textbook that was authored by Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot, as the second paradigm of engineering science; and (iii) the introduction of many other major advances, such as thermodynamics and reaction engineering. The curriculum and the accreditation requirements evolved a compromise between an anticipated set of job requirements for careers in different processes, and the availability of suitable organized knowledge and teachers. Evolution of Careers for Chemical Engineering Graduates In the beginning, most of the engineering graduates went on to become the captains and foot-soldiers of industry. Their rigorous and demanding education made them elite, in comparison with other university graduates, and actually prepared
them for many other careers and leadership positions. Many of the graduates became managers and consultants. The Centennial Committee of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) is compiling a list of chemical engineering graduates who went on to other careers, such as research scientists, and even playwrights and movie actors. The fraction that went on to other careers has accelerated in recent decades. The deindustrialization in America has had a negative impact on engineering employment. The overall employment of all U.S. manufacturing has declined from 17.2 million in 1996 to 14.2 million in 2006; the chemical industry employment has also steadily declined from 985 000 to 869 000 in the same period, and only the pharmaceuticals sector was able to buck the trend and increased from 229 000 to 292 000.8 (See data presented in Table 1.) The U.S. Census Bureau1 also describes the rising number of engineering graduates who have taken jobs in the fast growing service sector; this sector includes industries such as medicine, health care, law, business management and consulting, engineering consulting, financial engineering, entrepreneurship, environment, and safety. The year 1993 marked a transition, because
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Table 1. U.S. Employment Number Employed, × 103 industry
1996
2006
annual change (%)
manufacturing chemicals basic chemicals resin, rubber, fiber agricultural pharmaceutical paint, coat, adhesive soap, toiletries other
17 237 985 224 141 47 229 76 127 137
14 197 869 148 105 39 292 67 113 105
-1.9 -1.2 -4.1 -2.9 -1.8 2.5 -1.2 -1.2 -2.6
a
Source: Chemical & Engineering News, July 2, 2007 (ref 8).
that was the year that, for the first time, more U.S. engineers are employed in services (52%) than in industry (48%). Many chemical engineering departments have made surveys of the first entry positions and later positions of their graduates, and have reported rising trends away from manufacturing positions toward services positions. Some of the services positions are in the support industries such as engineering software, equipment, and consulting that are still centered on servicing the chemical process industries (CPI). They can be compared to the employees of fertilizer and tractor companies: those people are workers that are not counted as agricultural labor but, instead, are associated with the growing of food. For the CPI employees, there is also a decrease in plant manufacturing positions in favor of headquarters staff positions, such as research and development, planning, marketing, and customer service. Figure 3 shows that, as a product matures from spring to winter, creativity and innovation falls, the number of employees rises to a peak and then falls, while technology and shipment rises to a mature and stable plateau.9 The number of engineers required, the nature of the work performed, the risks and rewards involved, and the appropriate university preparation, are dependent on the life cycle of the product. The “seasons” depicted in Figure 3 can be described as follows. Spring: A few innovators get together to consider creating a new product for a market, or finding a new market for an existing material; they have little or no capital, they face a high probability of failure, and they have little or no product to ship. An example of this stage of industrial development would be tissue engineering: it sounds very promising, but it is very difficult to predict whether the idea will take off, and which companies will be the winners.10 The enterprise attracts innovators and risk-takers, who may become very rich or become jobless. Summer: The enterprise has grown into a fledging company with a promising product and growing financing and employment; it has shipped its first products and is working on improving the product and the process. Other companies are working on imitation or better products. An example of this stage would be ink for inkjet printers, which has a high price and growing market. The enterprise attracts the brightest and most ambitious problem solvers at the start of a great company with profit-sharing, instead of mere salaries. Autumn: The enterprise is now an established company, or is a division of a larger company, with a confident future and growing product shipment and revenue. It is now managed by professional managers and has many employees; and its main technical activities are process improvements, and safety and environment issues. Gasoline, for example, is a product where changes are driven not by increasing customer appeal, but rather
by safety and environmental factors. It has a low rate of process improvement, and it attracts people who are more efficient managers and troubleshooters than technology innovators. Winter: The enterprise is mature, with a low stock-price-toearning ratio, and manages mature products with low growth and profit. For example, salt and sulfuric acid are both vitally important in the modern world, but their manufacture offers low salaries and few prospects to college graduates. The United States will retain an advantage in the spring of new product innovations. Despite the higher cost of operation, the United States continues to excel in creativity, because of the large pool of scientists and engineers, and a tradition and culture of innovations. A high-profile company in the CPI takes the dual approach: to acquire new ideas from the outside, as well as to generate new ideas from within. These springtime activities require people who are creative and risk-takers. A more conservative company would put the bulk of its efforts in the summer and autumn activities, not to create new products but to improve current products and processes. The winter activities would be prime candidates for outsourcing to low-income nations abroad. It is unlikely that the United States can reduce process costs below those from low- and middle-income nations, especially if our per capita income is $40 000 but theirs are $1000-$10 000. The business model of the fully integrated company is rapidly being replaced by the innovative company that has only spring and summer in its portfolio and outsources the autumn and winter. Outside of the CPI, chemical engineering graduates have found successes in the various services industries. Some are services in support of the CPI, such as education at MIT, construction at Bechtel, consulting at Arthur D. Little, suppliers at Honeywell, and services at Aspen. There are also many exciting career opportunities in service positions that are not dependent on the fortunes of the CPI: well-known examples of this path include Linus Pauling of Caltech, Jack Welch of General Electric, Robert Goizueto of Coca Cola, Andrew Grove of Intel, and Sam Bodman of Fidelity and the Department of Energy. There should be a commission to collect the stories of the outstanding careers outside of the CPI and ask them to reflect on the most valuable lessons that they have learned in their chemical engineering curriculum that helped them to become so successful. Future Directions in Teaching What are the implications of deindustrialization in the United States and decreasing employment in the CPI? In the future, how do we continue to persuade the brightest and most ambitious high-school graduates to enroll in chemical engineering departments, in the hopes of gaining knowledge and contacts to build illustrious careers? What should we teach them? These are critical questions that should be answered for the continued existence and prosperity of the chemical engineering departments. Prestigious teaching and research jobs in universities are dependent on the continued existence and high standing of chemical engineering departments, whose graduates get good job offers with superior salaries and have outstanding future potentials. The brightest and the most ambitious students entering colleges will gravitate to departments noted for the illustrious careers of past graduates, and for connections to industries with exciting new products in spring and summer activities. Many leading chemical engineering departments already collected success stories of their alumni, and they should share them with other universities to strengthen our case. Our
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Figure 3. Life cycle of a product, showing (i) creativity and innovation, (ii) tasks and number of employees, and (iii) technology and shipment.
case also is dependent on the respect from future employers, who recognize that we have the most rigorous and demanding curriculum, and the most capable graduates. We are the only engineers who understand chemistry and economics, and we are adding biology to this list. Our faculty research must be on the cutting edge, so that our students working with them can become innovators of new technologies. Let us divide the future careers and educational needs of graduates into two groups: (a) The graduates with future CPI careers would need specialized chemistry of products and processes. They are wellserved by the traditional Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) degree that is accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and the AIChE. For this group, our current curriculum should be fine-tuned with courses and homework problems from future growth areas, such as biotechnology, microelectronics, nanotechnology, and the environment. It is likely that many of them would find assignments and challenges to work on international plants and markets, so that increasing their exposure to foreign languages and culture, as well as spending a summer or serving an internship abroad would give them a head start. (b) The graduates with future careers outside of CPI would have less of a need for chemistry and processing. We should anticipate that perhaps half of the chemical engineering graduates will have careers outside of the CPI. Would they be attracted to the curriculum designed to serve CPI, or would they prefer a more general engineering education with less
focus? Should we have, in addition, a Bachelor of Science degree that is more flexible and not accredited, with a separate curriculum that has the same demanding reputation to recruit the best students, and to teach them intellectual rigor and discipline? MIT already has had a degree program for many decades called BS Course X-C. The catalog reads as follows: “The curriculum for students in Course X-C involves basic subjects in chemistry and chemical engineering, but instead of continuing in depth in these areas, students can add breadth by study in other fields including other engineering disciplines, biology, biomedical engineering, economics, or management. Course X-C is attractive to students who wish to specialize in chemistry, physics, biology, patent law, or management while simultaneously gaining a broad exposure to the engineering approach to solving problems.” The program was originally established in recognition of the alternate career paths, and perhaps also as a relief for students preparing to drop out. It was never marketed aggressively by the MIT faculty, and it has never gained a significant number of enrollment and graduates. I am not aware of a highly successful degree program in any other universities for nonCPI careers. Here, I offer some reasons why we, as a technical discipline, should continue to serve both career paths by the same accredited BSE degree:
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(1) Students. An undergraduate is usually not sure whether he or she might end up working for DuPont and ExxonMobil instead of Goldman Sachs. The students know that (i) chemical engineering has a curriculum with a great reputation for being intellectually demanding and rigorous, (ii) chemical engineering attracts some of the best students, and (iii) chemical engineering future employers know that the graduate is used to leaping over higher and more demanding barriers. (2) Faculty. The faculty has the knowledge and enthusiasm to teach the required core subjects of the accredited degree program. It is easier to manage a single homogeneous curriculum than two curricula with different intellectual foci. We should not worry too much if some courses turn out to be not useful for some graduates, as long as the courses are intellectually demanding and build character. (3) Resources. Much intellectual effort, time commitment, patience, and money are required to create a new and equally prestigious program to attract the best students, or it would be thought of as a diluted version for less capable and ambitious students. In 2004, the National Academy of Engineering published a report entitled “The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century”,10 which concludes that “Engineers must adapt to new trends, and educate the next generation of students to arm them with the tools needed for the world as it will be,
not as it is today”. We should consider the fine-tuning and active promotion of chemical engineering education, as the liberal education of the 21st century, to teach what is useful in regard to making chemicals, as well as to prepare very ambitious students for a technology-driven world of the future. Literature Cited (1) Statistical Abstract of the United States; U.S. Department of Commerce: Washington, DC, 2007. (2) Kuznets, S. Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure and Spread; Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 1966. (3) Kuznets, S. Economic Growth of Nations: Total Output and Production Structure; Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1971. (4) World DeVelopment Indicators; World Bank: Washington, DC, 2007. (5) Wei, J. Engineering education for a post-industrial world. Technol. Soc. 2005, 27, 123-132. (6) National Research Council. Frontiers in Chemical Engineering: Research Needs and Opportunities; National Academy Press: Washington, DC, 1988. (7) Dertouzos, M. L., Lester, R. L., Solow, R. M., Eds. Made in America: Regaining the ProductiVe Edge; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1989. (8) Facts and figures: the chemical industry in numbers. Chem. Eng. News 2007, 85 (27), 29-68. (9) Wei, J. Product Engineering: Molecular Structure and Properties; Oxford University Press: Oxford, U.K., 2007. (10) The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century; National Academy of Engineering: Washington, DC, 2004.
James Wei* Department of Chemical Engineering, Princeton UniVersity, Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5263 IE0713238
