Maintaining the Individual within a Climate of Indifference: Specialization vs. Standardization in the Factory Model of Engineering Education

This research paper employs data from the study of a novel next-tier broadening participation access program to illustrate the challenge of maintaining awareness and understanding of our students as individuals within institutional systems of assessment and record-keeping that treat all students as the same in the interests of standardization. These standardized practices are intended to aid in the production of high numbers of engineering graduates—not unlike a factory that takes in raw materials in the form of students and outputs finished goods in the shape of engineering graduates. This factory model of engineering education, like any high-quality mass production system, optimizes for efficiency by standardizing processes. In undergraduate engineering degree programs, this is apparent from the relatively inflexible standard curricular paths within any given major and the use of midterm and final exams as “go or no-go” measurement gauges to determine which “products” (students) are of sufficient quality to move onto the next step (or class) in the assembly line of curricular requirements. An important aspect of this factory model is that colleges are systematically indifferent as to which students graduate and which go elsewhere since standardization of the process and objective assessments are presumed to ensure fair treatment for all students. This paper integrates findings across student performance, focus group, interview, and observational data to demonstrate the tension inherent in maintaining a broadening participation access program’s high-touch, personalized values within its larger institution’s methodical indifference towards students as individuals. This clash is exemplified through our investigation of the development and implementation of a pre-calculus course intended to support students’ progression towards “calculus readiness.” This paper describes the evolution of this pre-calculus course as its successful pilot becomes absorbed by the larger institution and expanded beyond the high-touch access model, with detrimental consequences for student success as the course moves from specialized to standardized. We propose alternative methods of preserving students as whole people within these reductionist, mechanistic environments of large-scale undergraduate engineering education.