Industry wants to get people that know more of what the market requires rather than just what the academic community wants them to learn.

The formal educational process is limited by the constraint on the time and money available. It's matter of "return on investment" and teaching/learning marketable skills takes priority over other areas that are perceived to have little or no financial value.

But that is a different issue than "lowering the bar".

Notice that I specifically used the term "good enough". If there is a need for mechanical engineers to know, using your example, how to specify threaded fasteners and mechanical engineers are not learning this, then that fails the test of "good enough", doesn't it? Reducing the expectations that mechanical engineers know some esoteric academic thing will not all of a sudden make them know how to specify threaded fasteners. It's quite the opposite, in fact. Presumably at one time mechanical engineers did leave school knowing how to specify threaded fasteners and, over time, the bar kept getting lowered on what was expected until, finally, that dropped out of the curriculum (and while it might have been to make room for that esoteric academic thing, the reason doesn't really matter). If that was needed to be "good enough", then the bar dropped too low, but because it is hard to tell that being able to specify threaded fasteners is a necessary part of being "good enough", it got dropped and engineers are therefore being graduated lacking that skill.

 

I believe that at one time, business and industry concurred with the educational community on what a college education should encompass.

Their convention was to provide a "well rounded" education rather than on a focused education. Furthermore, the collegiate academic community did not want to be associated with vocational education and their attitude was to shun anything related to industrial arts. Accordingly, the objective was to provide a strictly theoretical approach instead of teaching students how to build things.

To make matters worse, education at the high school level also focuses on college prep courses so engineer wanna bees aren't encouraged to take industrial arts where they could learn the basic nuts and bolts. With the basic preparation all but completely missing, many engineering students are grossly unprepared to go to work in a commercial environment.

 

You're preaching to the choir, my friend.

As an undergrad (in a Physic department) I got a LOT of hands on practical stuff because physicist routinely have to design and manufacture their own instruments and equipment. Not too many years before I went through glass blowing was a required part of the curriculum and machining and vacuum technology still was (and is). In addition, a lot of our lab equipment was old and had to be babied and fixed to make measurements which, while frustrating, was a great learning opportunity. We also had to design and build lab equipment for the analog and digital electronics labs that was used for many, many years.

But in the engineering department it was significantly different and although my alma mater has a strong reputation among employers for turning out engineers with much more hands-on practical skills than most schools, it was a very noticeable difference and I definitely saw the effects of the very openly expressed view that "we are educating engineers and not training technicians," which infuriated me to no end. To top it off, engineering schools, especially EE, have moved increasingly toward simulation instead of actually building circuits in the lab -- and the effects are as apparent as they are predictable.

I would love to see a ground-up industry/academia partnership in which it takes six or even eight years to get an engineering degree (in EE, at least, other disciplines might be more or less) but in which students start out working for an industry partner from day one and the school and the industry partner have coordinated on the series of employment experiences that the student will go through and the academics that reinforce that and prepare them for the next employment phase. The student is paid by the company at a level commensurate with the work being performed. Since the student is effectively taking courses half time and working half time, they should be able to pay their way through college (or at least come close) and graduate nearly debt free while the company should be able to turn a profit from the efforts of the students and have a steady supply of student employees to work with and, in some cases, bring on board after graduation. It also lets industry provide feedback on students that aren't up to the task of working at each level and having say in getting rid of them early (and not after they have racked up mounds of student loan debt) since they are motivated by only keeping good students whereas schools are motivated by keeping every student they can for as long as they can.

But there isn't a chance in hell of my idea coming to pass (except possibly on a very small private college and specific employer basis).

 

Engineering schools and industry have come to see the importance of exactly that approach. My son recently started 1st year engineering and all the universities he applied to had a co-op program. There was not such a thing in my days.

 

Engineering schools and industry have come to see the importance of exactly that approach. My son recently started 1st year engineering and all the universities he applied to had a co-op program. There was not such a thing in my days.

My college had a long standing co-op program and I participated in it -- did two 8-month stints at NIST plus a third after graduation. It was an extremely valuable experience. But while co-op was available it was neither required nor expected and only a small handful of students took part (about 1% if I recall). What is needed is a school that makes it mandatory and that also integrates it into the curriculum content, which almost no co-op program is. I think it would be best if they were in parallel so that the student worked half time and did school half time, but it could also work if the student alternated semesters doing full-time school in one and full-time work in the next. But I think the side-by-side would be more effective and also more attractive to employers because of the continuity of employment it gives.

 

Why not take an example?

Some numerical examples would be more than all the words