Despite the fact that I’ve not posted anything in over a week, it’s not that I haven’t been thinking about engineering education. Over the past two weeks I’ve read a lot about the problems that higher education will face in the coming years. There are those who think academia will collapse due to lower-cost alternatives, poor educational results, or structural disaggregation. And if the universities don’t do it to themselves, state funding for public institutions may disappear as the states go broke due to the current economic crisis.
I’m just starting to get a faint grasp on the issue at hand. So I feel pretty useless right now; I don’t have anything very intelligent to say about anything. However, I still think that engineering concepts can be conveyed to students more quickly and more efficiently. I’m happy to remain a newbie for now. I’ll keep reading and studying and thinking—and I’ll keep reporting on what I find along the way to a more informed opinion.