The wisdom of winter is madness in May

Humans have been dealing with change for a long time; as illustrated by Heraclitus' (c. 500BCE) truism, the only constant is change. However, while change has been constant, the rate of change is not fixed. Today, three broad trends—an increasing rate of technology-driven change, increasing interconnection and access to information, and convergence—present new challenges and opportunities for engineering education. Technology is transforming work, business, and organizational structures, bringing new pressures to bear on both engineering programs and the institutions of higher education in which they reside. To adapt to these changes, engineering education can benefit from better understanding its role in a large, complex ecosystem. Change is a staple of conversations in engineering education research. In fact, it could probably be said that the desire to change something is a driving factor for many individuals' engagement with engineering education and we drive our own change as we redefine our identity. Whether to improve engineering education, address issues of equity and justice, or extend knowledge of how engineering is learned, change can be considered as a defining aspect of engineering education. Our history has been marked by roughly decennial reports suggesting how changes in society, the economy, and the engineering profession should be reflected in engineers' education. The 1918 Mann report (Mann & Press, 1918) was written at a time when industry was rapidly incorporating more scientific practices and framed engineering education as needing to serve industrial production. The Grinter Report (1994), which highlighted the importance of engineering science, was published 2 years before Sputnik in 1955 and coincided with rapid economic expansion and growing American hegemony. The ASEE Goals of Engineering Education report of 1968 (Walker, Pettit, & Hawkins, 1968), the year before the first manned moon landing, sought to address the tensions between the rapid growth of technical knowledge and the broad knowledge necessary to act as engineer, predating more recent conceptions of T-shaped engineers (Johnston, 1978). The National Academy of Engineering's 1985 Engineering Education and Practice in the United States (Committee on the Education and Utilization of the Engineer, 1985) and the 2004 Engineer of 2020 (Clough et al., 2004) framed engineering as part of an increasingly complex sociotechnical system, weaving engineering tightly into technical, social, economic, and environmental contexts that have great societal implications. Today, in-demand skills are expanding to include problem solving and critical thinking, the ability to work with others, technological literacy, and adaptability (Committee on Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce, 2017). While engineering education has always sought to balance acquiring technical knowledge with meeting societal and workforce needs, three trends are emerging that when taken together portend significant challenges for being able to maintain this tenuous balance. One trend that impacts engineering education is that the rate of knowledge production is increasing, driven in large part by technologies created by engineers such as a ubiquitous high-speed mobile internet, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things. The social sciences recognize a double hermeneutic which states that a theory can impact beliefs in the world, generating new evidence for the theory. The analog in engineering education is that our students will go on to create new technologies, capabilities, and knowledges, which in turn change engineering and thus how we educate engineers. Keeping up with knowledge growth has been recognized as a challenge in engineering education for some time. For example, the rapid growth of knowledge in some fields raises debates on what to include or leave out of their curricula. Interviews from “The Distributed System of Governance in Engineering Education” project (Akera, Riley, Cheville, Karlin, & DePree, 2018) show faculty and administrators in engineering education worry about how to manage the increasing body of knowledge. The challenge that rapid growth of knowledge creates for engineering education is how to be agile and forward-looking while maintaining the historical focus of the university on universal truths. The second difference comes from increasing interconnection and access to information, which increases complexity. As information becomes more readily accessible, students have more opportunities to find alternative routes to a societally recognized learning credential that fits their budget. Our mental models of education—what Michel Foucault called an episteme (Foucault, 1994) and Thomas Kuhn a paradigm (Kuhn, 1996)—will need to shift as paths to credentials expand. The industrial-themed model of a pipeline is broadening to include multiple pathways (Malcolm & Feder, 2016), but engineering education exists within a broader, complex ecosystem involving schools, industry, governments and other entities (Lee, 2019; Lord, Ohland, Layton, & Camacho, 2019). While such complexity offers new opportunities, it also comes with costs, and Received: 8 May 2018 Revised: 20 February 2019 Accepted: 11 April 2019