Civil Engineering Undergraduate Education from the 19th Century Forward-The Experiment Continues

摘要

Civil engineering education, which encompasses much of hydraulic, hydrologic and environmental education, has changed over time. Several programs have experimented with 5-year undergraduate degrees, but most of these did not survive. More recently we have seen a trend in declining credit hours for a four-year bachelor's degree. During the first half of the twentieth century, most programs required 140 to 150 semester credit hours or more. Today, a 128 credit hour curriculum is quite common, and increasingly, a number of institutions are moving towards a 120 credit hour curriculum for civil engineering as legislative, college administrator and parental pressure mounts to control costs and minimize student debt. Several representative studies on engineering education have been produced and looking back in time include: 1.Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century (NAE, 2005) (A seminal report by the National Academy of Engineering, 2005).2.Engineering Education after the War. (Greene, 1922).3.The Hammond Report (SPEE, 1940). (Stressing the need for more scientific fundamentals in engineering training and released in 1940).4.The Mann Report. Evaluation of U.S. engineering education, focusing on common curricula and values (1918).These reports document the state of engineering education at various junctures in the 19th century and provide an excellent snapshot of the state of curricula during that period. This paper explores the roots of civil engineering education in the United States and how it grew to a formal four year program of study before the 20th century.