The philosophy, organization and delivery of liberal engineering education for lifelong learning and long-term success that support the unique Engineering program at Swarthmore College are presented. A fundamentally unified, process-focused curriculum with strongly integrated theoretical and laboratory components, it features careful faculty advising and critical attention to students' progress toward their own evolving career interests and goals rather than the more confining requirements of any single engineering discipline. The result is a solid preparation for both graduate education and engineering practice that does not preclude the simultaneous attainment of a genuinely liberal education within four years of undergraduate study. This small but well-respected program originated with the 1968 fusion of three formerly distinct engineering departments, and has since evolved to achieve noteworthy success in graduate school admissions, national fellowship awards and job placements. Situated in the best-regarded liberal arts college in the U.S., the Engineering program at Swarthmore is serving as a model for some other small engineering programs in the States. It might also provide a philosophical template for new engineering programs in other nations intended to educate modest numbers of excellent, multi-talented undergraduate engineers for both initial success and longer-term leadership in a wide variety of technology-related careers.

Informed by the technologically complex development of the atomic (fission) bomb in 1945 and the hydrogen (thermonuclear fusion) bomb in 1952, but badly surprised by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik I in 1957, engineering academic programs in the United States evolved rapidly and dramatically through the 60's from being practice-centered, mildly theoretical and workshop-intensive to being analysis-centered, heavily theoretical and modeling-intensive. From the mid-50's onward, an ever-rising tide of government research funding, stimulated by technology requirements of the arms and space races with the Soviet Union, accelerated the pace and fundamentally altered the character of faculty careers in engineering and, in turn, the career expectations of undergraduate engineering students. Emergence and rapid growth of new technologies involving nuclear energy, inertial navigation, supersonic and space flight, solid state electronics, microwave and video communications, remote sensing, and electronic computing (certainly not an exhaustive list) important to the Cold War effort gave rise to vigorous academic and defense-industrial employment markets in engineering. Narrow specialization, analytic skill and cutting-edge currency were most eagerly pursued and highly rewarded. By any reasonable measure, a paradigm shift in U.S. engineering education, driven by the needs of the military-industrial complex, began in the late 40's, was essentially complete by the late 60's and persisted well into the 80's.

But with the winding down of the Cold War in the late 80's, disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and rapid worldwide diffusion of solid state electronics, personal computing and satellite communication technologies, pressures of global economic competition and rising international environmental concern have begun to drive another paradigm shift in U.S. engineering education. This time, change is motivated by the need for more broadly trained engineers, drawn from the entire pool of competent high school graduates and equipped for productive careers as both creators and managers of technology in the global commercial market (Goldberg 1996). No longer can the U.S. or any other nation afford to rely upon the guidance of narrow analytic specialists unfamiliar with the needs, practices and limitations of commercial enterprise.

In the U.S. engineering education community, particularly as appearing in the Journal of Engineering Education, concern has steadily increased through the 90's that undergraduate engineering programs are not just overspecialized but overspecified as well. More might now be gained than lost by unpacking engineering curricula so that students of average capability can routinely complete them within four academic years (Kulacki 1995). That concern stems from decreases in entering engineering student enrollment, from poor initial retention (particularly of women and minority engineering students) and from declining four-year and even five-year graduation rates. One positive response is the newly developed engineering program accreditation criteria of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the relevant national accrediting authority in the United States. ABET's newly adopted Engineering Criteria 2000 document has replaced content-specific instructional credit-hour accounting to an outcomes-based assessment with substantial customer feedback from students, graduates and their employment or academic supervisors (EAC 1997).

Although engineering educators' professional discourse and undergraduate program accreditation criteria are changing, there remains a glaring mismatch between the early specialization rewarded with higher starting salaries by many employers of entry-level engineers versus the greater flexibility and breadth of expertise more helpful to engineers' long-term career success. This discrepancy is amply illustrated every month by letters from seasoned engineering managers to editors of professional journals and newsletters citing the inability of many new engineering graduates, despite their superb command of computer based analytic, graphic, desktop publishing and Internet tools, to communicate or collaborate effectively with colleagues, supervisors or customers. Indeed, one of the first student surveys undertaken in response to the then newly-proposed ABET criteria indicated that student engineers themselves favor increased technical program content and even- less exposure to social, economic and cultural content (Koehn 1995). As perceptive processors of signals from older students, faculty, prospective employers and graduate supervisors, many engineering undergraduates are intent on maximizing their immediate market value. They deeply discount the greater value of long-term career success because no one around them shows any concern for it. So we should not be surprised if one prompt effect of the new, customer-sensitive ABET accreditation criteria in the U.S. turns out to be an even more intense narrowing and specialization of engineering curricula, because short term feedback is emphasized, and true long-term external feedback is largely absent.

Because the retrospective view of ABET accreditation is limited to six years, it is practically impossible to measure the effectiveness of any particular engineering curriculum in equipping its graduates for longer-term success - they have been "out" an average of only three years. BS graduates employed in industry or commerce, regardless of performance, are unlikely to have advanced beyond supervised engineering work or first-level production supervision. Those who continued full-time for an MS will be in their first engineering positions, and most of those pursuing the PhD will not yet have received their degree. Graduates' feedback to undergraduate program evaluators is therefore limited to information about success at obtaining a first job or admission to graduate study, plus some subjective reports about how well prepared they perceive themselves to be relative to their peers. Moreover, most of the specific, upper level technical content of these graduates' programs will not yet be obsolete, so the "staying power" of their educations as supported by fundamental knowledge and robust learning skills will not have been subjected to real, critical examination.

This intrinsic focus on easier-to-evaluate short term outcomes mirrors the even shorter view of U.S. industry, where most corporate managers are rewarded primarily on the financial return of their units in the current quarter and are therefore very unlikely to initiate or support long-term strategies, research or development efforts. Yet one can now read about some U.S. firms that are more confident of mid-term survival and have contractually linked executive compensation to longer term corporate performance in order to encourage critical self-evaluation, foresight, strategic planning and teamwork, and to reestablish continuity of technological and management capability. While such firms are relatively few in number, their presence is an indication of a returning concern for long-term strength, and a recognition that the long-term strategy is not merely a concatenation of many sets of short term tactics. Is any similar recognition dawning in academe?

Unpacking the undergraduate engineering curriculum, concentrating more on fundamentals and thereby giving student engineers more opportunity to acquire the habits of mind and personal skills needed to interact effectively with businesspeople, bankers, industrialists and government leaders is similarly working against the established practice of technical specialization for short-term gain (Van Valkenburg 1989). To educate engineers for the longer term with confidence about short-term strength requires not only superior students with some breadth of interest but also a steady commitment of institutional resources to sustain the computing and equipment needs of such a program through inevitable fluctuations in enrollment and external support. It also requires faculty sympathetic to the spirit of the program and effective as teachers and mentors of undergraduates. Few institutions currently enjoy such a combination of resources, but one that does is Swarthmore College, a small private institution near Philadelphia that is among the handful of undergraduate liberal arts colleges in the U.S. that compete for students and faculty with Ivy League universities, first-rank technological institutes and public research universities.

The curriculum in Engineering at Swarthmore College was first implemented in 1968 with the coalescence of Civil, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering departments that had earlier separated in 1909. The new, unified program underwent substantial structural evolution through the early 70's, but has since changed only through continual modernization of content. It is founded on the concept of collective responsibility of faculty for the long-term effectiveness of the education acquired by students, not only as preparation for professional practice but for active engagement in the social and political lives of their communities. The following excerpt from the Engineering section of the current College Catalog (Swarthmore College 1996) expresses it well:

"A responsibly educated engineer must ... not only be in confident command of current analytic and design techniques, but also have a thorough understanding of social and economic influences and an abiding appreciation for cultural and humanistic traditions. Our program supports these needs by offering each engineering student the opportunity to acquire a broad yet individualized technical and liberal education."

The Engineering program at Swarthmore reflects a broader educational responsibility on several levels. Generally, by requiring that engineers satisfy every academic requirement set for all Swarthmore College students. These include facility in a foreign language equivalent to three semesters of college-level study, and significant writing experience in at least six academic disciplines via no fewer than three writing-intensive Primary Distribution Courses in each of the College's three Divisions: Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences & Engineering. Professionally, by requiring no less than one and one half years' (twelve courses) work in Engineering, with a strong common core, a laboratory component in every course, and a yearlong culminating design project. And comprehensively, by insisting that every engineer satisfy the College's "Twenty Course Rule": no fewer than twenty courses (two and one-half years of study) must be taken outside the major department.

The Twenty Course Rule embodies the ideal of liberal education in the U.S.: hat both depth and breadth of experience are to be achieved in every responsible educational program. It guarantees each student at Swarthmore the opportunity to design and pursue a course of study that will enhance the long-term value of his or her undergraduate work. Even with some reduction of those twenty courses by ancillary degree requirements of four courses in Mathematics and four in the Laboratory Sciences, there remain at least twelve totally unspecified courses through which engineering students can discover social and economic influences and explore a variety of cultural and humanistic traditions. Adherence to this Rule is absolute; students can only take additional courses in the major department as overloads, and that is strongly discouraged.

The nominal four-year schedule for a Swarthmore engineering major is shown in Table 1. L denotes courses with laboratories. PDC denotes introductory courses with strong, discipline-appropriate writing components.

PDCs or Primary Distribution Courses, offered by each of the 18 departments of the College, are introductory in content but offer majors and non-majors alike an accurate, current perspective on the modes of scholarly engagement that characterize each discipline, and have a substantial writing component in one or more appropriate modes. Students must complete three PDCs or two PDCs plus a higher level course in each of the three Divisions of the College. Further, at least two departments' courses must be represented among the PDCs taken in each Division. Most liberal arts students complete the PDC requirements within their first two years; engineers usually complete them in three years due to the greater number of required math, science and core engineering courses.

Each engineering student is assigned an engineering faculty advisor for his or her first two years, not only to provide assistance with course selection but also to serve as a knowledgable guide to a wide range of available academic support services. The college is also particularly careful to initially place each student enrolling in mathematics courses in the course most appropriate to his or her actual competence, irrespective of Math SAT or Advance Placement scores. This is done trough the use of a local diagnostic examination and subsequent conversations among the Math department, the student and his or her advisor.

The first two years of Swarthmore's Engineering program look a lot like those elsewhere in the U.S., except that there are only four courses per semester, and there are no separate courses in computer programming or software package use. Each course is accordingly designed to engage students for a total of 12 to 15 hours per week, and computer skills are taught as part of the writing or laboratory component of each course. Engineering Methodology is a half-course that introduces first-year students to problem solving, team and individual design projects, departmental faculty expertise and research, computer network capabilities and programming with MATLAB; it is strongly recommended, but not required. Two thirds of our entering engineers have completed at least one semester of Calculus; these are strongly advised to add a semester of Linear Algebra after Integral Calculus and then choose an advanced section of Multivariable Calculus. A more sophisticated Physics 7&8 sequence may also be substituted for Physics 3&4.

Notice that in the final two years, only half the student's total workload is devoted to engineering subjects, not three-quarters, four-fifths or five-sixths. This is when Swarthmore engineering majors gain the unique opportunity to use their now-substantial academic skills to engage in whatever social, economic, humanistic and cultural studies are most relevant to their own academic and career goals. Such experience in the liberal arts is not only much more extensive than in the typical four-year engineering program, but is also very different from that of a typical 3-2 program, wherein liberal arts courses are necessarily restricted to the first three years, and then totally absent from the final two.

All Swarthmore students apply for majors during the second semester of their second year. At that time, each student prepares a "sophomore paper" justifying the selection of major field(s), major electives and free electives for the remaining two years on the basis of coherence with his or her stated academic goals. Electives available for degree credit in Engineering are shown in Table 2. All faculty are available as resource people to students and their faculty advisors during the preparation of these papers, and each department acts on its major applications with the students' sophomore papers, academic records and proposed plans of study in hand. About one third of our engineering majors take advantage of the Twenty Course Rule to pursue a formal six-course interdisciplinary Concentration like Environmental Studies, Computer Science or Public Policy, or an entire second major like Economics, Mathematics or Philosophy, sometimes within a 32 course program but more frequently through additional summer study and judicious course overloads. The lesser number of engineering courses required by our Twenty Course Rule also permits students to study elsewhere, in the U.S. or abroad, usually for one semester, and still complete their degree requirements within four years; about one quarter avail themselves of this opportunity.

The most important means by which a full 1.5 years of engineering education is delivered within the scope of only twelve courses are the incorporation of laboratory work into every engineering course and the small size of class and lab sections. Although lectures in the core engineering courses are presented to classes of about 35, lab sections in these courses typically include four or five students, never more than eight. Elective courses seldom enroll more than 15 students, most include eight to ten and some as few as four. Labs in these courses typically are set pieces for the first half-semester, followed by individual or small-group term projects that require both substantial written reports and practiced oral presentations. Individual directed readings are also available. With nine engineering faculty serving about 120 students in such small classes, there is plenty of personal contact, role modeling and mentoring to complement the substantial analytic course content.

Students around the college know that engineering courses require a higher level of sustained effort than most others, and while this no doubt inhibits some non-majors from taking any of the several "outreach" electives available to them, it develops among engineering majors a capability for serious and sustained work and contributes strongly to their pattern of academic and later career success. The capstone senior Engineering Design project, which runs through the entire senior year but carries only one course credit, provides an opportunity for extensive one-on-one interaction between each student and an interested faculty supervisor that frequently inspires seniors to extraordinary achievement. Enabling the development of knowledge acquisition skills and progressive self-discovery that generates such inspiration (Bordogna 1993) is a continuing goal of our program.

Small classes and the sense of community mean that individual initiative can be more effective. Faculty know students well enough to counsel and assist those in need of special support, and can also act as facilitators, mentors and even research colleagues to others who are ready and able to excel. Research participation supported by faculty external grants and, in summers, by stipends administered through the College enable as many as half our students to work with faculty as research colleagues. Many also participate in NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates summer programs, some highly competitive, at other institutions. As a result, most students who aspire to academic or industrial research careers have at least two summers of solid research experience to support their applications to graduate school and equip them for productive work there.

Finally, Swarthmore has for over sixty years also offered a challenging Honors Program to superior majors of all departments, wherein the only degree honorifics available at the college are awarded by consensus of invited external examiners after an arduous series of comprehensive written and oral examinations, three in the major field and one in a minor, conducted at the conclusion of the final year of study. About one quarter of each class opts for this mode of preparation and examination for honors, but those who do find the mental discipline and integrative capability developed over their two final years of study to be of great value throughout their post-baccalaureate careers.

The Engineering program at Swarthmore focuses more intently and persistently on the process of learning how to acquire technical knowledge than on covering myriad details of content. Whether in core or elective courses, great importance is given to explaining why the technical approaches and methods presented are appropriate to a subject generally and to particular types of problems or situations, rather than simply asserting their applicability and showing how to use them. This approach requires more presentation time, which is gained by being more selective about the number of topics presented in courses and by giving students greater responsiblity for being adequately prepared for class. It takes a while for entering students to learn to meet that increased responsibility, but most respond well to the challenge. Academic support including an evening departmental clinic staffed by juniors and seniors, a convenient area for clinics and group study, and individual tutoring assignments if necessary all contribute to the message that learning how to learn is central to the program.

Although there is plenty of content in the five required core courses and in each of the more than 20 available electives in Civil, Computer, Electrical, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering subjects from which each major selects six in addition to his or her required Senior Engineering Design project, the absence of additional discipline-specific course requirements beyond the general ABET minimum enables students to devise and pursue elective programs best suited to their own interests and goals. Sometimes these goals are consistent with a single conventional engineering field. Sometimes they may involve a combination of subjects from two or more fields, and occasionally they are highly unconventional yet strongly consistent with a student's prospective career. The Swarthmore engineering faculty's ready availability for academic advising and career counseling, both before and after graduation, has become near-legendary. It is not unusual to write a letter of recommendation for an alum even three or four years after graduation - informed by a series of letters, phone conversations or email messages throughout those years. The high regard in which our alumni hold the college and department is no accident, and their strong advisory and financial support indicates their lasting appreciation of our concern for them as individuals in preparation for lifelong careers.

Our situation within one of the premier liberal arts colleges in the United States guarantees a wide range of excellent curricular offerings and extracurricular activities to complement our engineers' major programs, but more importantly it forces them, as a minority discipline on campus, to become familiar with the thought pattems and conversant with the opinions and arguments of their non-engineer peers who may know little about technology or science but nevertheless legitimately aspire to leadership in academe, the arts, business and govemment. The necessity and intensity of social and political discourse among future scientists and humanists, both outside and within the classroom, equips all of them for more competent realworld leadership - an education of unique breadth and strength.

Maintaining our focus on process without neglecting content is made ever more difficult by the increasing pace of technological development. Not only must we thoroughly ground our curnculum in engineenng science and design fundamentals as preparation for graduates' professional work and continuing self-education, but also include in each upper level course an appropriate survey of and engagement with the current state of the art. Conflict among these legitimate requirements for breadth of introductory exposure, technological depth and currency in upper level courses, and preserving students' opportunity for an equally rich engagement with fields beyond technology induces a stress that continually drives our curricular evaluation and renewal. We must and do achieve and maintain in every major's collection of twelve Swarthmore engineering courses a program that not only remains worthy of external professional accreditation but is also intellectually credible within a premier undergraduate liberal arts institution.

However, we frequently find that less is more in paring down excessive detail to achieve course syllabi that concentrate effectively on central concepts. There are real limits to the rate at which students' minds can absorb new information, and by giving them the opportunity to set a lesser volume of new content firmly within a growing context of important concepts and techniques, we can avoid the all-too-common occurrence of information overload. Our students are much less likely to randomly discard "excess" information, important or otherwise, in a frantic effort to keep from being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new things to know when a course syllabus assumes juggernaut proportions. Retention of new material and students' relation of it to existing knowledge across their entire range of experience are enhanced when their mental absorption limits are not exceeded. Almost invariably, the outcome is a more complete integration of their working knowledge across arbitrary disciplinary boundaries, and greater facility in making creative connections.

Engineers so educated are well prepared for leadership roles in the professional community and society at large, but such leadership is ordinarily achieved only through a succession of positions of increasing skill and responsibility, beginning with the first and most direct technical assignment. Getting each of our graduates started in the right job or at a well-chosen graduate school program is an important first step. Engineering faculty encourage seniors to read regularly the current technical and popular literature in their areas of interest, search the Web, contact authors or reviewers (usually by email) and initiate an exchange of ideas or opinions that may lead to a working relationship. Following up on recommendations and leads from recent graduates is another effective means of establishing productive contacts. These techniques work, for not one graduate undertaking a serious job search has failed to obtain a suitable position within three months, nor have any immediate graduate school applicants failed to gain admittance.

Currently, half our engineering graduates go directly to graduate school, where more than two thirds continue in engineering and the rest in economics, business, math, medicine or law. Of those who go directly into industry or commerce, we find that more than half immediately begin graduate study part-time to complement their fundamental engineering preparation with more detailed exposure to the technological state of the art or to modern techniques of business management. More than 90% of engineering graduates obtain an additional degree within ten years of leaving Swarthmore.

Many of those continuing their engineering studies do so with fellowship support, and over time our graduates have won significant numbers of NSF, DOD, Watson, Whitaker, Churchill and Rhodes fellowships. Like those who go directly into industry, our graduate-educated alumni frequently report after five or more years a definite realization that our program's focus on broad command of engineering fundamentals and learning how to integrate information from both engineering and non-technical disciplines has made them better able to excel in changing circumstances, whether in a PhD program, a manager's office or on a factory floor. Growing career volatility is making such flexibility an increasingly valuable characteristic.

Delivery of an excellent, fully complementary technological and humanistic undergraduate education is strongly enabled at Swarthmore by our admission process, which produces a student body of unusually high quality. The College is one of the most selective in the United States, and all admitted students share high levels of scholastic achievement and academic aptitude. Admissions tends to favor highly motivated, active students having a wide range of academic talents and interests, well-suited to the breadth and intensity of our program. Median SAT score of enrolled students is historically about 650V/700M, and about one quarter have stood first or second in their high school graduating class. Women constitute between one-quarter and one-third of the cohort of engineering students, versus slightly more than half for the college overall. About one-fifth of our engineers are foreign nationals; among these Economics is frequently a minor or double major.

Clearly, such a program as Swarthmore's is not feasible or even desirable as a norm for engineering education. It is very expensive in terms of faculty and physical resources, and requires a collaborative faculty who are not only dedicated to undergraduate education but also comfortable with allowing some students to pursue quite unconventional elective programs. And, of course, it also requires highly capable, multi-talented students. But with such faculty and students it reliably produces outstanding and immensely satisfying results.

Within every community, city and nation there are certainly some such students who will become more active community members and more productive citizens if enabled by this sort of liberal engineering education. Just a few more engineering programs like Swarthmore's, set firmly in a context of liberal education, whether at undergraduate colleges or at comprehensive or research universities, would better serve the needs of a much greater fraction of the cohort of multi-talented, socially aware prospective engineering students and significantly increase the supply of industrial, academic, business and government leaders fully conversant not only with technology but also with its potential for social good.

In engineering education, as in all important endeavors, great strength lies in having a variety of approaches. Programs heavy with technology and nearly devoid of "unrelated" subjects may be appropriate for those engineering students near one extreme of a multivariate national distribution of interests and abilities, but the richness of that distribution assures the existence of many other positive extremes populated by engineering students who are also strongly gifted in other fields. Conventional engineering curricula largely fail to meet the needs or unlock the productive potential of such students, and increasing globalization of both commerce and education requires that their talents not go untapped. Swarthmore's is among a very few engineering programs in the U.S. that intentionally target this small but very important market segment. There should be more.

Other institutions in the U.S. and worldwide, especially smaller ones having only traditional disciplinary engineering programs, might profitably increase their attractiveness to multitalented, unconventional prospective engineers, and particularly to women among them, by establishing a deliberately unpacked general, "non-traditional" engineering program. Invite some number of interested students to complete a substantial common lower-division core of fundamental technical subjects, devise with competent and sympathetic faculty advice a suite of upper level electives from two or more engineering departments, and choose an appropriate final-year capstone experience. Together these elements must satisfy the general technical content and process specifications of the national engineering accrediting authority without necessarily fulfilling any of the prevailing, discipline-specific content requirements. Prior negotiation will probably be necessary to obtain such disciplinary exemptions, and must be undertaken to avoid later conflict with professional licensing bodies. But all this work is worth doing to achieve the program flexibility that will help attract and retain the target student population.

Enabling engineering undergraduates' educational initiative to flourish can yield amazing results; Swarthmore College now has nearly three decades of living proof. Bright, active students from families that appreciate the lifelong value of a liberal education will take the calculated risk of obtaining a deliberately general Engineering degree in order to capture the advantage of defining as well as achieving their own educational goals. Allowing these eager students to devise and pursue individualized programs for four years in the company of others of similar character and energy reliably results in impressive outcomes when they present themselves to employers and to graduate programs. More deserve the opportunity to do so.

Bordogna, J., Fromm, E., and Ernst, E.W. (1993) Engineering Education: Innovation through Integration. Journal of Engineering Education, 82 (1), 3-8

EAC (1997) Engineering Criteria 2000. Criteria for Accrediting Programs in Engineering in the United States, Engineering Accreditation Commission, Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc., Baltimore URL: http://www.abet.ba.md.us/EAC/eac2000.html

Goldberg, D.E. (1996) Change in Engineering Education: One Myth, Two Scenarios, and Three Foci. Journal of Engineering Education, 85 (2), 107-116

Koehn, E. (1995) Practioner and Student Recommendations for an Engineering Curriculum. Journal of Engineering Education, 84 (3), 241-48

Kulacki, F.A., and Vlachos, E.C. (1995) Downsizing the Curriculum: A Proposed Baccalaureate Program and Contextual Basis. Journal of Engineering Education, 84 (3), 225-34

Swarthmore College (1996) Swarthmore College Bulletin 1996-97, XCIV(1), 134-41 URL: http://www.swarthmore.edu/Admin/catalogue/departments/engineering.html

Van Valkenburg, M. (1989) Second Opinion: Unjamming Our Curricula, Engineering Education, April 1989, 456

Back to Table of Contents