Asce's Raise The Bar Initiative: Accreditation Related Barriers & Other Critical Issues

The conditions and broad requirements of engineering practice are rapidly changing – and they will change even more in the future. Moreover, engineering education is also changing, perhaps more rapidly than ever before. To its credit, ABET in the last decade has made substantive changes in accreditation procedures for engineering programs. The change from focusing evaluations on input measures to an outcomes based approach with much more flexibility is in line with total quality improvement concepts. The fact that each program to be accredited must have detailed published educational objectives that are consistent with the mission of the institution provides potential for variations in the programs and no longer are engineering education programs necessarily in lock-step (1). Differences and uniqueness in individual programs are valued.