I'm not so sure it's stupid. It would raise our billing rates which have historically been pitifully low compared to other professional services. I'm kind of sold on it since I would bet that an undergrad in engineering is MUCH different now than it was when I graduated in 2006. I'm sure you've probably been out even longer. Are you aware that abet accreditation essentially requires you to take such a breadth of classes that there is essentially no specialization with a bachelor's degree? I know in my firm, there is absolutely no way that I would hire someone with less education than a MS. A student simply cannot cover all of the construction materials before they graduate with a bachelors and it is a waste of money for businesses to educate them. Most schools we hire from now are actually eliminating masonry design (which is ABSOLUTELY BONKERS). In all seriousness, I would like to hear your take on why it is stupid as I've seen quite a bit of your material on eng-tips and respect your opinion.
I wanted to give my viewpoint on this as a civil engineering professor in structures. I don’t agree with the idea of requiring a master’s degree to take the PE. This would cause two main problems as follows:
1) It will essentially say to industry that the only possible way you can gain the knowledge to do your job is by getting a MS degree. Nothing could be further from the truth. While an MS degree is valuable and you get more in-depth coverage in select topics, it is not the only place to further your understanding of materials and design. People learn through their experiences which could be gained from multiple avenues. I have the same issue with NCEES not letting people who have decades of work experience sit for an FE or PE exam, because their background is not the cookie cutter mold 4 year degree path. Academics would like to believe that they are the end all be all of knowledge, but that simply is not true. Having said this, it’s perfectly acceptable for your firm to require a MS degree, but that requirement shouldn’t be pushed on everyone else. If NCEES decides that advanced experience is required to take the PE, they should provide multiple options in addition to an MS to satisfy the requirement such as webinars, development hour demands, etc.
2) What is covered in a MS degree will never perfectly align with what’s on the P.E. exam. Some courses will be more pertinent than others. For example, prestressed concrete design will be more applicable than Finite Element Analysis to the P.E. exam. Also, MS courses tend to discuss a lot more theory than practice, and as we all know the two are often not one in the same. Keep in mind that the focus of academia lies in research, and a lot of classes are geared towards this. The PE exam is supposed to test a minimum level of competency to practice engineering, which is primarily learned through working on actual projects. Also, classes like timber and masonry tend to be elective classes at the undergraduate level, where graduate students can take a select number of undergraduate courses to count towards their MS degree.
If it was up to me, the undergraduate degree would be 5 years with the last year covering topics like wood and masonry design, in addition to a basic class on LRFS and how to design diaphragms and shear walls. Students would also have a specific class on indeterminate structures like in the 80’s, because it’s embarrassing that students coming out of school today can’t draw the moment diagram for a basic indeterminate beam by hand (moment distribution, unfortunately, is not taught). I will probably never get my way with Universities promoting shorter and shorter degree programs. I do the best I can with the time I have.
Now I’m about to go on a rant, so feel free to stop reading. It’s my opinion that it’s taking longer and longer for firms to train recent graduates, because in general engineering professors don’t have the ability to or are too arrogant/lazy to teach well-prepped courses. In turn, students are not learning how to think on their own. I’ll just use structural analysis as an example. Traditionally, most professors will follow the chapters outlined in the Hibbler book, and all homework and exam questions will come from that book. The students will most likely torrent the solution manual for the book, and the only thing that’s been learned is how to copy. What the professors should be doing is calling up a structural firm, asking for a set of basic plans, and telling students to draw the shear and moment diagram for the beam at grid line A between 1-3 accounting for material weights and live load. This requires the student to actually think about how to calculate loads, and shows them that a beam is not a rectangular block that sits on top of a triangle and a circle. Professors don’t do this because it would actually require them to solve the problems themselves, plus they might get a question that actually requires them to look at something other than a textbook to answer it. I know this is true, because during the very first class of my structural capstone class, I give the students a set of structural plans and tell them to calculate the unfactored loads that would be transferred to a footing. I get looks like I’m speaking in a foreign language and they need the Rosetta Stone to do the calculations. This is just one example of how professors lack in basic teaching skills. The other common issue in engineering is professors cram a ridiculous amount of material into a single course. I wish professors would realize that fullly understanding a little is better that not knowing much about a lot. My favorite example of this is the steel professor at my college. For his class he covers tension, bending, shear, compression, torsion, bearing and slip critical connections including eccentricity, welds, 1st and 2nd order frame stability analysis, and base plate design. That sounds great until the students get to my advanced design class and can’t tell me whether a bolt is in shear or tension, or how forces are transferred in a bearing connection.
In addition to this, professors don’t ask students to draft anymore which is beyond ridiculous, so again students get no exposure to how an actual building fits together. Almost everyone of my homeworks requires students to draft a beam or connection they’ve designed from a set of plans, and it pisses me off that my other colleagues won’t do the same. Another underlying issue that I don’t think industry is as aware of are the use of adjuncts to teach fundamental classes. With academia trying to be as cheap as humanly possible, more and more temporary teaching positions are used to cover classes like statics, strength of materials, etc. The interview process for some of these positions goes like this, “Oh, you have a PhD and took statics and are willing to work for wages you couldn’t live on, congratulations, you’re hired”. Then what happens is you get someone that either a) hasn’t actually used statics in the 21st century, b) is some cryptic old person with one foot in the grave that is senile, or c) is a international professor that follows a textbook like cooking instructions from a recipe book with no variation, and doesn’t actually understand statics beyond the class problems. When this happens students come out of the course more confused than when they went in, and the effects carry over from course to course until graduation. I actually saw one college have an environmental engineering professor teach statics, and another college had a construction management professor teach strength of materials. Finally, one of the most critical problems is professors aren’t willing to raise the standard that students should meet. To elaborate, professors don’t fail as many students as they should, and they’re not making students responsible for basic skills such as penmanship and drafting. A lot of this also has to do with the tenure process, where, if you bring in a million dollar grant you could essentially take a dump in the middle of your classroom and still get tenure.
What I’m getting at is it shouldn’t be difficult or time-consuming to teach a recent graduate masonry design, if the graduates actually knew how to critically think.
