These environments, he points out, involve greater require-ments for each project, and the public has greater expecta-tions, especially in such areas as sustainability and other new paradigms. “So we’re looking into the future at a much dif-ferent kind of engineering profession requiring an advanced and broadened set of skills for the engineer to be successful to protect the safety, health, and welfare of the public,” Leonard concludes.
By contrast, Leonard notes, some engineers focus only on “present time and backwards,” questioning why, if their own education “was fi ne for me, why isn’t my education fi ne for the next generation?” But these engineers are “failing to
look forward at the kinds of changes that will be happening for the engineers who will practice in 2030 and 2040 and 2070,” Leonard explains. “And they’re also failing to recog-nize the changes in education that have occurred” in recent decades, he notes.
These changes in what engineers are expected to know and to do and in how they are to be trained to meet their pro-fessional responsibilities are at the heart of the Raise the Bar initiative. It is an effort that engineering leaders knew at the outset would require decades, not just months or years, to achieve. As with the efforts by engineers during the fi rst half of the 20th century to enact professional licensure laws in ev-ery state, the goal of requiring a master’s degree or 30 addi-tional credits must be adopted on a state-by-state basis. That in itself is a daunting task—no state has yet adopted the mas-ter’s degree or an equivalent as a requirement for professional licensure. And even when that fi rst state does change its law, history suggests it will take considerable time before the ma-jority of states follow suit.
Wyoming adopted the fi rst professional engineering li-censure law in 1907, but four decades passed before Montana became the 48th and fi nal state to do so in 1947 (Hawaii and Alaska not yet being states), notes Jeffrey S. Russell, Ph.D.,
P.E., Dist.M.ASCE, the vice-provost for lifelong learning and the dean of the Division of Continuing Studies at the Univer-sity of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. And it took until nearly 1980 to secure licensure laws in U.S. territories and the Dis-trict of Columbia. In similar fashion, in 1979 Iowa became the fi rst state to mandate continuing education for profes-sional engineers; today, 41 states have this requirement, ac-cording to a January 2015 state-by-state summary compiled by the National Society of Professional Engineers, of Alex-andria, Virginia (www.nspe.org/sites/default/fi les/resources/pdfs/education/state_ce_requirements.pdf).
Thus, the adoption of the Raise the Bar goals will entail
“a long process—a marathon, not a sprint,” explains Thom-as W. Smith III, ENV SP, F.ASCE, ASCE’s executive director. “Persistence, perseverance, and patience” are what will ulti-mately see the effort through, Smith adds.
NOW IN ITS 20TH YEAR, the Raise the Bar effort es-sentially began in 1995, when “key educational and professional leaders of the civil engineering commu-nity in the United States began working to reform civil engineering education,” according to the 2012 paper “The Raise the Bar Initiative: Charting the Fu-
ture by Understanding the Path to the Present—An Over-view,” written by Russell and Thomas A. Lenox, Ph.D., Dist.M.ASCE, then an ASCE executive. (Now retired, Lenox was a professor at the United States Military Academy be-fore joining ASCE’s staff.) The paper was published in the Proceedings of the 2012 Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education and can be accessed at www.asee.org/public/conferences/8/papers/3048/view. (Also see “Policy Statement 465: Why We Must Raise the Bar,” Civil Engi-neering, April 2002, pages 60–65 and 94–95, and “Prepar-ing the Civil Engineer of Tomorrow by ‘Raising the Bar,’” Civil Engineering, September 2007, pages 64–71.)
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SK BLAINE D. LEONARD, P.E., D.GE., Pres.10.ASCE, a Utah Department of Trans-portation program manager for intelligent transportation systems, about the status of the Raise the Bar initiative—which would make a master’s degree or an equiv-alent 30 hours of additional advanced courses one of the prerequisites for becom-ing licensed as a professional engineer—and his answer is, quite literally, forward looking:
“Our motivation is entirely about the future,” Leonard explains. “We see rapid changes around us. We see advancements in technology. We see modifi cations in the development of new materials and new processes. We see new design proce-dures that are becoming increasingly complicated.” Moreover, Leonard says, “we also see ourselves as engineers working in much more complex environments.”
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Focused ON THE Future
The Raise the Bar initiative for engineers has built upon decades of study, discussion, and activity within ASCE and other organizations. And its focus points in one direction: to the future of the profession so that engineers can continue to be adequately prepared to ensure the safety,
only obligation as a profession, that’s one view. But if we view it from a different perspective, one in which we continue to integrate across many of these different social concerns and is-sues, in addition to meeting the code requirements, that view will take a different breadth and depth in terms of the formal and practical experience that one attains before becoming li-censed.” And that is where the master’s degree or equivalent becomes critical.
Ethically, engineers are obligated “fi rst and foremost and paramount to uphold public safety, health, and wel-fare,” Russell adds. But while the question of public safety is fairly well understood—preventing injuries and fatali-ties—public health and public welfare are broader concepts and are more diffi cult to quantify, he contends. Consider a new building. If you meet the code requirements in terms of foundations, structural systems, and electrical and mechani-cal systems, the structure will probably be a “safe” building. But will it be a building designed to optimize the health of occupants and foster productivity? Will it promote the high-end creativity of modern knowledge workers? These are more diffi cult aspects to quantify, Rus-sell explains.
Or suppose a road is washed out in a fl ood and people must drive considerably farther to reach their jobs or a building is shut down by high water. Even if no one is injured, “the im-pact of an extreme water event in terms of the use of the facility, what it takes to get the facility back online, has signifi -cant implications for health and welfare, even if they’re very nuanced,” Russell says. In such cas-es, the greater breadth and depth of knowledge an en-gineer would acquire during his or her graduate work could prove essential to meeting those health and welfare obli-gations. “It’s a question of being able to integrate the broader context,” Russell explains, “of being able to think through from a risk point of view what some of these scenarios might be.” For example, water is a sustain-ability issue, and sustainability issues can be linked to weather patterns, so the en-gineer with a master’s degree might start thinking about risks and different scenarios with a range of possible outcomes, all of which could lead him or her to ask, “What kinds of extreme events could impact or infl uence my design?” Russell explains.
Another critical point in favor of raising formal educa-tional requirements is that even as the demands on engineers are increasing, the number of credit hours required in many typical four-year undergraduate engineering programs has been decreasing.
In an October 21, 2014, letter to Robert D. Stevens, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, ASCE’s president, in support of Policy Statement 465, Lieutenant General Thomas P. Bostick, P.E., M.ASCE, the commanding general and chief of engineers of
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, noted that “while de-mands on engineering curricula have increased, many schools have signifi cantly reduced the credit hours required to earn an engineering degree. This trend is counter to our needs. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers...shares your concern that the body of knowledge necessary to enter the profession-al practice of engineering in the future is beyond the scope of today’s four-year...degree—even when coupled with preli-censure on-the-job experience.”
For example, in the article “The Engineering Credit Slide Continues,” published on the National Society of Profession-al Engineers’ website on August 16, 2011, Craig Musselman, P.E., Dist.M.ASCE, the president of CMA Engineers, of Ports-mouth, New Hampshire, and a former licensure board mem-ber, some 17 percent of the institutions that reported their information to the American Society for Engineering Educa-tion in 2010 had reduced their engineering program credit hours to 120, compared with just 10 percent of respondents that had done so by 2000—a “steady and an unmistakable continuing trend,” Musselman noted.
And even when the required number of credit hours re-mains above 120, the fi gure is often still far below what it used to be. When he earned a bachelor’s degree in engi-neering from New York City’s Manhattan College in 1961, Charles H. Thornton, Ph.D., P.E., Hon.M.ASCE, the chair-man of Charles H. Thornton & Company LLC and a cofound-er of the international engineering fi rm Thornton Tomasetti, had to complete roughly 160 credit hours. But today, a sim-ilar engineering degree at Manhattan College requires only 132 credit hours.
The reasons for reducing the credit hours vary but often involve a desire to reduce the costs of college by enabling students to earn a degree in four years. This is particularly
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By 1998 the “call for action” issued three years earlier led ASCE’s Board of Direction to adopt Policy Statement 465, originally entitled “First Professional Degree” but now bearing the title “Academic Prerequisites for Licensure and Professional Practice.” This policy notes that “in the future, education beyond the baccalaureate degree will be necessary for entry into the professional practice of civil engineering.” The necessity of engineers obtaining education beyond just a four-year bachelor’s degree was repeated in ASCE’s 2004 re-port Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century:
Preparing the Civil Engineer for the Future (a second edition ap-pearing in 2008), in ASCE’s The Vision for Civil Engineering in 2025, and in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2005 report Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century. As outlined in these publica-tions, the additional educational requirements would not take effect for at least eight years after being passed by a state so that students currently pursuing an engineering curricu-lum would not have the rules changed in midstream. Fur-thermore, engineers already licensed at the future effective date would not be subject to the new requirements.
The National Academy of Engineering report, in particu-lar, offered a stunning portrayal of the myriad educational chal-lenges facing future engineers. With so much new information in so many new areas leading in so many possible directions, the best comparison was to an explosion. “It is evident that the exploding body of science and engineering knowledge cannot be accommodated within the context of the traditional four-year baccalaureate degree,” the report stated.
As Leonard notes, when he graduated, in 1981, “envi-ronmental engineering was a course that consisted of how to do water treatment and sewer treatment.” At the time, sustainability wasn’t a key concern yet, wetlands were con-sidered “swamps,” he adds, and the courses he took did not
cover such issues as contaminant plumes in groundwater, the treatment of pharmaceutical by-products in water, or other complicated issues that are now so prominent. Whereas his undergraduate courses only considered point-source con-tamination, today’s engineers must also consider non-point-source solutions. “We get contaminants running off of the en-tire roadway into the storm drain system,” Leonard says. “Oil residue from automobiles, grit and dust from the air, debris, all kinds of things—it’s a new paradigm, not only for envi-ronmental engineers but also for the general civil engineer
practicing in land development and transpor-tation,” he explains.
Moreover, even though technical excel-lence is considered the essential attri-bute of engineering graduates, “those graduates should also possess team, communication, ethical reasoning, and societal and global contextual analysis skills as well as understand work strat-egies,” the National Academy of Engi-
neering report urged. If such areas as the humanities, economics, po-litical science, and language are ne-glected, even in favor of technical subjects, it will not be “in the best interest” of future engineers, who
must be trained to be lifelong learners so that they will be “able to communicate with the public” and “engage in a glob-al engineering marketplace,” the report
concluded.Leonard notes that “it’s not enough to
just treat the water we have so we can drink it.... We have to do a better job of understanding how to use it more effectively.” That involves conservation, which in turn requires an understanding of public policy and regulato-ry issues. “It may have been enough in the past for us as engi-neers to simply say, ‘When you’re ready to build a water treat-ment plant, call me and I will do that,’” he explains. “But to really be effective in protecting the public safety, health, and welfare, we need to be in the conversation, saying, ‘OK, how do we fi nd the water? Where does it come from? How do we deal with it? How do we conserve it? Are there alternatives other than how we have always been doing this?’”
Engineers need to be part of the entire conversation, Leon-ard says. They need to be familiar with political science, with how communities work, and with how laws are made and regulations established. “We need to be able to walk into the city council when we’re asked to talk about a project and un-derstand the bigger picture,” he stresses.
Unfortunately, these skills are not taught in most un-dergraduate engineering programs; only a combination of an undergraduate and a master’s degree program—or the equivalent 30-credits path in addition to the baccalaureate degree—will make room for these professional skills and this contextual background, Leonard explains.
As Russell explains, if people think that engineers should “simply meet the minimum code requirements and that’s our
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practicing in land development and transpor-tation,” he explains.
Moreover, even though technical excel-
that they will be “able to communicate
concluded.
just treat the water we have so we can drink it.... We have to do a better job of understanding how to
“Our motivation is entirely about the future. We see rapid changes around us. We see advancements in technology. We see modifi cations in the development of new materials and new processes. We see new design procedures that are becoming increasingly complicated. Moreover, we also see ourselves as engineers working in much more complex environments.” — B L A I N E D . L E O N A R D
Or suppose a road is washed out in a fl ood and people must drive considerably farther to reach their jobs or a building is shut down by high water. Even if no one is injured, “the im-pact of an extreme water event in terms of the use of the facility, what it takes to get the facility back online, has signifi -cant implications for health and welfare, even if they’re very nuanced,” Russell says. In such cas-es, the greater breadth and depth of knowledge an en-gineer would acquire during his or her graduate work could prove essential to meeting those health and welfare obli-
think through from a risk point of view what some of these scenarios might be.” For example, water is a sustain-ability issue, and sustainability issues can be linked to weather patterns, so the en-gineer with a master’s degree might start
Another critical point in favor of raising formal educational
requirements is that even as the demands on engineers are
increasing, the number of credit hours required in many typical four-
year undergraduate engineering programs has been decreasing.
other major professions, has remained static since then at just the four-year baccalaureate degree, Lenox says.
Leonard echoes that thought, noting that a graduate degree is essentially required to be a licensed clinical social worker, a physical therapist, a school principal. “It’s just sort of under-stood” that you’ll need an advanced degree in those fi elds, he explains. “But it shocks me that engineers don’t understand this—that we who are in a very technically oriented profession haven’t fi gured out what everybody else has fi gured out—that to practice competently in the future we just can’t do it with a bachelor’s degree anymore. It just doesn’t fi t.”
Of course, some engineers and engineering fi rms have al-ready reached that conclusion. A graduate degree is already practically the baseline requirement for becoming a structural or geotechni-cal engineer across the industry, notes ASCE’s Smith. At Thornton Tomasetti, for instance, it is almost impossible to be hired without a master’s degree, explains Thornton, who believes that the stature and con-fi dence of an engineer are increased by earn-ing a graduate degree. Thornton jokes that he “knew everything” about engineer-ing when he received his bachelor’s de-gree and that it took a master’s degree to make him realize how much he still needed to learn.
Looking to the future, many engi-neers see the engineering profession eventually heading in the direction of a team concept analogous to a medical practice. Lenox recalls a recent operation he underwent that involved, obviously, a surgeon but also a team of licensed practical nurses, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, and others, each of whom had his or her own specialized training or education and, in some cases, licensure or certifi cation. “The sur-geon did not come in and take my blood every hour. That was done by a [licensed] practical nurse,” Lenox says, and someone else monitored his blood pressure or prescribed his medica-tions. Engineering practices could function in a similar way, the team headed by a licensed professional engineer holding a master’s degree with various other specialists, for example, en-gineering technologists and engineering technicians, taking responsibility for some of the supporting work, Lenox explains.
As the Raise the Bar initiative moves into its third decade, certain aspects have changed. Last year, the NCEES removed Raise the Bar provisions from its model law and asked a com-mittee to put them in a position statement instead. The mod-el law is used as a guide by state engineering and licensure boards, and some boards were concerned that it set too rigid a deadline for the master’s degree or equivalent requirement. That deadline, January 1, 2020, was seen as too near to meet, explains Tetra Tech’s Nelson, who at present is serving on the NCEES committee that was asked to move the Raise the Bar provisions into the council’s new position statement.
For the University of Alabama’s Fridley, the young civil
engineering students he encounters give him an insight into the future. Although some opponents of Raise the Bar wor-ry that adding a master’s degree or equivalent will turn large numbers of qualifi ed students away from the profession, Frid-ley fi nds the opposite to be true.
“This isn’t a big issue” for the students, many of whom already expect to need a master’s degree “for their own pro-fessional growth and marketability,” Fridley explains. It’s an expectation matched by the reality of data from a report re-cently issued by the Center on Education and the Workforce, part of Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, that compared students with science, technology, en-gineering, or mathematics (STEM) degrees with non-STEM
majors (read “STEM College Majors Earn the Most at All Points in Careers,” on Civil Engineering online). According to the report, an estimated 36.5 percent of civil engineering ma-jors currently go on to graduate school, which boosts their av-erage annual earnings to $101,000, well above the $83,000 average for all civil engineering graduates.
Moreover, Fridley has often solicited the views of fresh-men about the provisions of the Raise the Bar initiative as part of an introductory civil engineering course. Over the past fi ve years, roughly two-thirds of the students responded positively to the idea of requiring a master’s degree for pro-
fessional practice. “To me, if we’re talking about two-thirds of incoming freshmen at a top state university who aren’t fazed by it whatsoever, then I really don’t think there’s an issue or a concern,” Fridley concludes. CE
Robert L. Reid is the senior editor of Civil Engineering.
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true of state institutions, notes Kenneth J. Fridley, Ph.D., F.ASCE, the senior associate dean for administration in the University of Alabama’s College of Engineering. “If it’s ad-vertised and promoted as a four-year degree, then students should be able to graduate in four years,” Fridley says, call-ing this a question of accountability and responsibility for state-funded schools.
Between 2003 and 2012, Alabama’s engineering curric-ulum was reduced from 132 credit hours to 125. Although Fridley notes that modern technology helps the university “put more technical content into a credit hour today than we
were able to do years ago,” he concedes that the changes have reduced some of the earlier program’s fundamental breadth.
“Where before we required all students to take thermo-dynamics and circuits, today it’s a choice of either or,” Fridley says. Likewise, the former requirement of a laboratory class in both mechanics and materials is now just a “civil engineer-ing materials lab,” which “covers some aspects of mechanics materials that we felt were important, so the students are still getting some of the critical information—but not the broad coverage of a hands-on lab experience with both mechanics and materials,” Fridley explains.
The work that ASCE has done in defi ning the civil engi-neering body of knowledge also helped guide some of these changes, Fridley adds. Originally, he explains, the university required students to take two semesters of chemistry, two of physics, and one of an additional science, typically geology. Initially, this was reduced by eliminating that additional sci-ence semester. But in part because of the body of knowledge recommendations, the curriculum was readjusted again to re-quire one semester of chemistry and physics, a second semes-ter of either chemistry or physics, and one semester of an addi-tional science. The end result is a program that has sacrifi ced
some depth in chemistry and physics but offers additional breadth in science overall, Fridley says.
In many cases, the information lost from the undergradu-ate programs could be restored and even expanded through a graduate degree program. If a master’s degree were actu-ally required for future professional licensure, universities could then “focus the depth and specialization that many em-ployers and students want in the master’s program,” Fridley notes. This would then enable the universities to “bring back some of the fundamental breadth of topics that we’ve had to take out to meet the credit hour reductions,” he says. The re-
sult would be a more comprehensive undergraduate program combined with a “master’s program that’s a much more professional track fo-cusing on the technical depth and
specialization of the students’ interests,” Fridley explains.
SOME CRITICS of the Raise the Bar initiative have sug-gested that ABET, the body responsible for the accredi-tation of the approximate-ly 275 undergraduate civil
engineering programs in the United States and 1 master’s degree program,
could solve the engineering education problem simply by, say, raising the number of re-quired credit hours to 150. But given the trend toward fewer credit hours, that idea is
“dead in the water,” says the University of Wis-consin’s Russell, who adds that ABET would be unlikely to support it anyway.
Moreover, far from increasing the number of credits, ABETwould not even agree to a request contained in a resolution is-sued in 2007 by the National Council of Examiners for Engi-neering and Surveying (NCEES), of Seneca, South Carolina—which develops, administers, and scores the engineering and surveying licensure examinations in the United States—to place a lower limit on the number of credit hours, notes Jon D. Nelson, P.E., Dist.M.ASCE, a senior vice president in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, offi ce of Tetra Tech and a former NCEESpresident. Although some engineers mistakenly believe that ABET does set a lower limit, its refusal to do so raises concern that someday the number of credits might even fall below 120, Nelson adds.
What engineers are trying to accomplish through the Raise the Bar initiative is just what other learned professions have already discovered, notes ASCE’s Lenox. Medicine and law began requiring additional education during the fi rst half of the 20th century, he explains. Pharmacy and account-ing made the move in the 1990s, and the formal education-al requirements of these professions today range from fi ve to eight years. But engineering, which at the beginning of the last century required more formal education than all of t he
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sult would be a more comprehensive undergraduate program combined with a “master’s program that’s a much more professional track fo-cusing on the technical depth and
specialization of the students’ interests,” Fridley explains.
Sengineering programs in the United States and 1 master’s degree program,
“dead in the water,” says the University of Wis-
The reasons for reducing the credit hours vary but often involve a desire to reduce the costs of college by enabling students to earn a degree in four years. This is particularly true of state institutions.
be hired without a master’s degree, explains Thornton, who believes that the stature and con-fi dence of an engineer are increased by earn-ing a graduate degree. Thornton jokes that
surgeon but also a team of licensed practical nurses, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, and others, each of whom had his or her own specialized training or education and, in some cases, licensure or certifi cation. “The sur-
What engineers are trying to accomplish through the Raise the Bar initiative is
just what other learned professions have already discovered. Medicine and
law began requiring additional education during the fi rst half of the 20th century.
Pharmacy and accounting made the move in the 1990s, and the formal educational
requirements of these professions today range from fi ve to eight years.
