RE-INVENTING ENGINEERING EDUCATION ONE NEW SCHOOL AT A TIME

摘要

Few engineering schools have the opportunity to start from scratch and address the calls for reform in engineering education that came from the National Science Foundation, the engineering community at large, and the National Academy of Engineering through its 2004 and 2005 reports, The Engineer of 2020 - Vision of Engineering in the New Century and Educating the Engineer of 2020 - Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century. The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (http://www.olin.edu/), which opened to its inaugural freshman class in fall 2002, graduated its first students in 2006, and achieved ABET accreditation for three degree programs (electrical and computer, mechanical, and general with concentrations in bioengineering, computing, materials science, and systems) in 2007, is one such school, and the U.A. Whitaker School of Engineering (http://www.fgcu.edu/eng/index.html) at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU, http://www.fgcu.edu/), which graduated its first students in bioengineering, civil engineering, and environmental engineering in May 2009, is another. They are similar in that both FGCU (a public university) and Olin (a private college) focus on excellence in undergraduate education and have multi-year contracts for faculty rather than a tenure system. One big difference between the two is that Olin began with a commitment of more than $400M, which made it possible for Olin to offer free tuition to classes who entered before fall 2010, whereas the U.A. Whitaker School of Engineering has received ～$24M in public and private funding for a 70,000 gsf building and $2.2M in recurring funding from the state to support the costs associated with teaching engineering and pre-engineering courses.