Challenges And Responses Over A Quarter Century Of Manufacturing Education

Over the quarter-century that has encompassed the life of the ASEE Manufacturing Division, education in manufacturing engineering and manufacturing engineering technology has faced more-or-less continuous challenge. It has always been difficult to convey the excitement and fulfillment of a manufacturing engineering career to young students -and to the choice as an undergraduate major. It has always been difficult to make the case for the value proposition of expensive laboratories with university administrators. It has always been difficult to forge and maintain meaningful and effective linkages between campus and industry. Over the years, these challenges have been framed to reflect the crucial focus of the time -of a particular year. At several key points in the past quarter-century, the manufacturing education community has come together to craft a useful response to the challenge-of-the-year. Many of these responses have become bedrock for education in the manufacturing engineering discipline. As the Manufacturing Division enters its second quarter-century, it is relevant to reflect upon the challenge-response cycle and, through that lens, to peer into the uncertain future. Yet again in 2010, manufacturing education faces substantive challenge. Once more, responses of depth and wisdom are needed. This paper will review three of the defining challenges of the past quartercentury and the responses that emerged. It will conclude with a view of current challenges and a suggestion for a path towards effective response. Perspective: The ASEE Manufacturing Division celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary year in 2010. The first annual conference with divisional status for our group was in 1986 at Cincinnati, and it is fitting that the twenty-five-year milestone is being observed just down the Ohio River in Louisville. Whilst we are celebrating the milestone, we should also remain cognizant of the roots of divisional status that were planted some five years earlier in Southern California, when the Constituent Committee was first formed. Amidst the plethora of questions and alarums that have claimed attention of manufacturing educators over the past quarter-century and more, three primary challenges can be singled out as the encompassing issues. The first of these great issues is the definition of a body of knowledge for manufacturing engineering -and of a curriculum to convey such knowledge to undergraduate students. The second primary challenge was the crafting of an articulated differentiation in terms of outcome objectives between and amongst the various educational degree levels that contribute to the professional discipline. The third great challenge has been the crafting of a strategic framework that enables individual programs to incorporate newlyemerging transformational technologies into a cohesive corpus of manufacturing engineering. These great issues have been accompanied by continual concerns about the identity, health and vitality of the manufacturing engineering profession. Enrollments and the recruiting of young students into manufacturing engineering majors have been matters of substantial concern for at least three decades. The dialogue in 2010 still sounds remarkably like that in 1980; persuading bright youngsters to enter the challenging world of manufacturing engineering has been a hard sell throughout this entire period. In parallel, the struggle to equip and maintain modern teaching laboratories has changed little over three decades. Perhaps more so than most engineering disciplines, manufacturing laboratories are expensive of both space and equipment, P ge 15272.2 and persuading the university hierarchy of the need for investment has always been akin to mastering an arcane foreign language. Likewise, the connectivity of campus and factory has been discussed and debated in more or less constant terminology for several decades. Almost unchanged for thirty years, industry observers focus on their short-term needs and chide the academy for not having better technical foresight than their industrial counterparts. Conversely, while striving to be responsive to changing skill-set needs, educators wonder at the inconsistency and superficiality of industry support for the grooming of next generations of manufacturing engineers. Figure 1: Challenges, Achievements and Persistent Problems in Manufacturing Education It is suggested that the issues of recruiting and enrollments, of laboratories and teaching resources, of university-industry connectivity are symptoms of the larger issues identified above. The philosophical question that echoes throughout the three great issues is one of identity. What is “manufacturing engineering”? What is the inviolable persona of the professional organization that bears this title? What are the mutual responsibilities and dependencies between education and industrial practice? It is postulated that if these questions were to be answered clearly and without ambiguity, effective responses would be forthcoming to the great issues and to the nagging symptomatic problems. Likewise, it is further posited that continuance of this “great identity debate” is the causal source of the persistency of symptomatic challenges. At this point, readers should rest easily for the nonce. This paper will not become a polemic screed on philosophical issues. Those worthy questions are left to another venue in another time. Nor will this paper address the persistent problems of student numbers, teaching resources and academic-industrial interaction. Those are matters of perspective, lurking in the background for !"#$%&'$(')(*( +,*$-)*./-0%$12(3'!4(')(5$'67"!1"( !"#$%&'$(')(.',8"/"$.4(*.9%":","$/;( )'0(:*0%"!(!"10""(7":"7;( %$.'08'0*&'$(')( *!:*$."!(/".9$'7'1%";(