Written Contributions to the EHR Advisory Committee
Public Hearing on Employers' Views
________________________________________________________________________________

Convened November 1, 1995
At the National Science Foundation
Arlington, VA

                              Invited Speakers:
        "Employers' Views on the Preparation of SME&T Undergraduates"

Listed in order of Testimony.  Titles indicate the speakers' positions at the
time of the Hearing.

Baltimore Public Schools                           Walter G. Amprey
Baltimore, Maryland                                Superintendent

Columbia University                                Eugene Galanter 
New York, New York                                 Professor of Psychology

New York Hall of Science                           Peggy Ruth Cole
New York, New York                                 Director of Program Planning
                                                   and Development

GHG Corporation                                    Israel J. Galvan
Houston, Texas                                     President

Hewlett Packard Company                            Alfred Moye
Palo Alto, California                              Manager, University Relations

                                                   Robert W. Ritchie*
                                                   Director, University Affairs

Boeing Commercial Airplane Group                   John H. McMasters
Seattle, Washington                                Senior Principal Engineer,
                                                   Aerodynamics Engineering

                                                   James D. Lang*
                                                   Director, Technology 
                                                   Division, New Aircraft and 
                                                   Missile Products, McDonnell
                                                   Douglas Aerospace, St. Louis,
                                                   Missouri.

National Alliance of Business                      Robert Jones
Washington, District of Columbia                   Executive Vice President

Shell Oil Company                                  John J. Sisler
Houston, Texas                                     Manager of Exploration & 
                                                   Production Training

Bell Atlantic Corporation                          Patrick E. White
Arlington, Virginia                                Vice President, Strategy

*  Additional author of contributed remarks.

                   Employers' Views on Desired Capabilities
              of Undergraduate Students Entering the Workforce

                              Walter G. Amprey

     Superintendent of Public Instruction, Baltimore City Public Schools
                             Baltimore, Maryland

I thank the National Science Foundation for this opportunity to testify on
behalf of public education concerning the undergraduate preparation of students
entering the workforce. Our "industry," public education, develops a "product"
that ultimately must support a regional and national economy and must be the
source of problem-solving ingenuity and innovation to meet the challenges of
change. The university undergraduate product we depend upon to mold this
"product" is the new teacher: either a science, mathematics, engineering, or
technology (SME&T) major who often enters secondary education or a non-SME&T
major. Even though these teachers receive formal instruction in content and
methodology, they are not fully prepared to teach effectively as soon as they
graduate.

Many new teachers arrive at their first assignments lacking sophisticated skills
in writing, speaking, and computing. These are essential skills for success in
any workplace. In addition to these "basic" skills, all graduates should be able
to think logically and be able to show their students how to use higher level
thinking skills.

Technological literacy is another basic requirement for successful citizens of
the Information Age. All new teachers should be able to use technology and adapt
to its roles and applications. They also should be able to appreciate the power
of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology in everyday living and
should understand how mathematics and science support, undergraduate, or clarify
concepts in other disciplines such as art, music, and social studies and in
diverse career fields.

Along with these "basic" skills, new teachers should understand organizational
"culture" and the need for continuous improvement. When entering the workforce,
all new teachers should be able to contribute to team efforts that focus on an
organization's goals and respect their co-workers' abilities. New teachers
should also enter the workforce seeking more education. They must understand
that continuous study and research, both formal and informal, are essential, and
that preparation for teaching does not end at college graduation or with a
master's degree.

SME&T content are also essential for all new teachers. Non-SME&T majors,
especially those, who will become elementary teachers, need broad-based
knowledge of SME&T content, so they can integrate material into any subject
area. They also need to be aware of career opportunities for their students and
be able to direct students to appropriate course work for their career goals.

While all teachers should be technologically literate, those who become SME&T
teachers should be able to use technology as a pedagogical tool in their
classrooms on a regular basis. SME&T teachers also should be well grounded in
modern pedagogy and be able to apply modern pedagogical techniques to their
content areas.

In their content areas, SME&T teachers should know more about the subject
materials than they are required to teach. For example, a pre-college
mathematics teacher for senior high school should be able to teach freshman and
sophomore courses at the college level. Similarly, a chemistry teacher should be
able to handle undergraduate skills and concepts in addition to knowing the
state-of-the-art equipment.

New SME&T teachers should have the benefit of sufficient practicum/internship
experience before they graduate. After they graduate, these new teachers should
have mentors who are experienced teachers as well as mentors who are based in
business and industry. SME&T teachers cannot lose focus on the world of SME&T
beyond the classroom.

In general, all SME&T majors must be able to adjust to the changing demands of
the workplace and use the higher level skills of thinking in mathematics and
science to be productive workers. As requirements of business and industry
change and as corporate downsizing becomes a reality, graduates must have the
transferable skills and flexibility that will provide them with successful
livelihoods.

Undergraduate SME&T education for majors and non-majors is influenced by several
trends. First, the increased requirements in mathematics and science in
precollege education will require colleges to introduce more rigors in
college-level courses. Second, the increased number of students in the pipeline
for SME&T at the precollege level will increase the number SME&T majors at the
college level. This will require more college SME&T faculty. Finally, the
increased number of SME&T-literate precollege students will increase the number
of majors in college and technical schools who will request training in
SME&T-related fields.

Ideally, undergraduate SME&T education for potential teachers should be
developed through collaborations of local school districts and universities. For
example, the National Science Foundation funds the Maryland Collaborative for
Teacher Preparation, an alliance of the University of Maryland system, Morgan
State University, Baltimore City Community College, and three Maryland public
school systems. This project focuses on elementary and middle school science and
mathematics instruction and supports joint efforts to meet the needs of teachers
new to the profession. Many informal collaborations coexist with such formal
arrangements. Thus, individual public school staff members interact frequently
with their colleagues on college faculties because of numerous projects that tie
them together. In addition, a number of institutions of higher learning assist
local districts in meeting their identified needs.

The standard school district/University interface, however, is the student
teaching program, where young people preparing to be teachers work in classrooms
under the joint guidance of a classroom teacher and a college professor. Because
individual school systems are institutionally separate from the teacher training
institution, school district needs are not always met as quickly or directly as
possible since universities must meet their own goals and objectives. This
"extended reaction time" sometimes keeps the teacher training institutions one
step behind the needs of the school district. What is needed is a process for
more rapid and direct implementation of system needs into college programs.

Improved articulation between school districts and teacher training programs
also would reduce the need for "remedial" teacher training. Because so many new
graduates need in- service training to perform satisfactorily, it appears that
the training programs at the college level lack content and pedagogy or lack
understanding of the needs of the school district. New teachers must be able to
apply educational theory in their daily teaching practices. Too often, the
practices demonstrated by professors in teacher preparation courses are not the
state-of-the-art pedagogical methods that are needed for instruction in
precollege classes.

SME&T curriculum for both majors and non-majors must be broadened and deepened
if we are to improve elementary and secondary instruction. Preparation of
secondary teachers, for example, usually includes almost as many courses as a
SME&T major; however, new teachers should be up to the standard of all other
graduating SME&T majors. Elementary teachers enter the workforce with very
little content background in science and mathematics. Further, they are not
challenged to become more prepared because "seasoned" administrators whose
backgrounds may be lacking in science and mathematics content supervise them.
Thus, a self- perpetuating cycle of "science and mathematics weak" elementary
curricula establishes and maintains itself

Both pedagogy and curriculum can best be improved through the collaborations of
precollege and undergraduate faculties. With such alliances, curricular and
pedagogical innovations could better address the knowledge and performance bases
of students -- and better prepares them for jobs and career paths.

Finally, as colleges and universities work with school districts to update and
upgrade teacher preparation programs, states should re-evaluate their
requirements for teacher certification. Currently, a limited number of SME&T
courses is required, especially for elementary teachers. New standards should
emphasize the integration of mathematics and science in other disciplines such
as art and history where high-level skills in problem solving and decision
making are required. States also need to increase their requirements for
certification of mathematics and science teachers as more rigor is introduced in
college and precollege courses. In general, certification requirements should
give all potential teachers more practical and comprehensive "hands-on"
experience in mathematics and science.

To meet the requirements of the 21st century workplace, we must work harder to
disseminate needed improvements in educational practice. On the national level,
roundtable discussions and other forums involving school districts and teacher
education institutions could address problems. Direct local interaction on a
regular basis can resolve problems as they occur. Collaboratives already address
some of those needs, but superintendents and college administrators need to
interact more frequently. This will prevent the bureaucratic needs of either
institution from overwhelming the common goal of providing and employing a
competent SME&T workforce in education.

Local districts such as the Baltimore City Public Schools look forward to
continued partnership with the National Science Foundation, other federal
agencies, and other funders. Specially funded programs have produced many
positive outcomes. For example, more minority students enter the SME&T pipeline
and consequently enter lucrative career paths where they have historically been
under-represented. These programs have also provided the dollars to assist these
young people as well as dollars to assist colleges and universities establish
SME&T programs. NSF grants to colleges and universities have provided equipment
-- and resulting technological literacy -- for students training to function
successfully as scientists, engineers, or teachers. Specially funded projects
have developed teacher-training programs, such as "STARS," featuring
state-of-the-art hands-on/minds-on pedagogy. In the future, we hope
organizations such as NSF will develop more collaboratives to help us meet
critical needs.

In recent years, changes in our society have produced changes in the direction
and practices of education. We have become more sophisticated. We have adopted
the principle of ethnic and gender equity. We expect all students to know more
and to perform at higher levels. The growth of technology and its application in
the mathematics and science classroom require that new teachers be computer
literate and that they be adaptable to new technologies and techniques as they
appear. Because we expect students to know more, we expect new teachers to know
more and be prepared to learn more throughout their careers. Also, as we
implement performance-based instruction, cooperative learning, and
"hands-on/minds-on" strategies, teachers must be prepared with an expanded "bag
of tricks" so they can deliver a 21st century curriculum.

Walter G. Amprey has been Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Baltimore
City Public Schools since 1991. From 1973 to 1991, he served in administrative
positions in the Baltimore County Public Schools - associate superintendent for
staff and community relations, associate superintendent for physical facilities,
director of staff relations, and principal and assistant principal. In 1966, Dr,
Amprey began his career in education in the Baltimore City Public Schools as a
social studies teacher then served from 1971 to 1973 as a school administrator,
He holds a doctorate in education from Temple University, a master's degree in
educational administration and supervision from Johns Hopkins University and a
master's degree in history/social science and a bachelor's degree in
history/secondary education from Morgan State University.  Dr. Amprey was
honored as Maryland Superintendent of the Year, 1994-95, and served as president
of the Large City Schools Superintendents of U.S. and Canada, 1995-96. Most
recently, Dr. Amprey served with Reverend Jesse Jackson as facilitator of the
Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's Public Policy Education Conference, "Closing the Gap,"
in Chicago, Illinois.

           Testimony to the NSF Undergraduate Review Subcommittee

                               Eugene Galanter

                Professor of Psychology, Columbia University
                             New York, New York

Real improvement in science education (SME&T) at the baccalaureate level will
require: a) revisions in instructor attitudes and interests; b) attention to
multiple cognitive and motivational functions of students; c) revisions in
standard modes of instruction; d) new evaluation procedures; e) augmentation of
new technology; and finally f) serious longitudinal studies. I will attend
mostly to items a - d. The last pair are technical issues that need attention by
experts in these fields.

To begin with, instructors (clearly not all) must recognize that students don't
think science or math is much fun. They are mainly forced into science by
curricular or career path requirements, e.g., chemistry or biology for medicine,
psychology for aspects of medicine or social or technical professions, and
physics and math by those with self-recognized quantitative or computational
skills for technical or scientific program management. Engineering students are
self-selected for these skills, and comprise a less intense problem for
engineering instructors. However, many of these students at research
institutions are more interested in engineering science than real engineering.
In my discipline (experimental psychology), students choose our introductory
courses to satisfy (effortlessly they hope) a requirement, or to find a less
demanding career with the cachet of science. They may then discover that some of
the materials are daunting, or that the substantive materials barely speak to
their interests.

I attack the question of how to advance science education at the undergraduate
level by asking several questions.  First: how many students really want to take
science in college? The answer is very few.  Which sciences do the students
take?  Our data show that except for pre-meds, they opt for the easiest, the
least quantitative, and the most descriptive.  The third question: Do these
sciences provide opportunities for such students to engage seriously in the
technical world: The answer, I am afraid, is maybe not.  The fourth question is:
What can we do?  And that constitutes the heart of my suggestions.  These
suggestions must be tempered by the enormous revolutionary events that are
occurring now in our colleges and universities. My colleague, Eli Noam in the
Columbia Business School, has just published an article in Science on the demise
of the university as the mechanism by which information transfer occurs.  His
point is that, in the past, the user went to the source.  Now the source is
distributed to the user.  So what does the user need our real estate for?  The
consequence is that this will engender enormous changes, changes in which
instrumentality's that we have never thought of as the educational base of our
activities will become the instrumentality's by which information does flow to
our consumers, if you will pardon that expression.

Back to our primary topics.  Once instructors recognize these default attitudes
of students -requirements or jobs - they can often loosen-up the relentless
drive to provide technical materials that span a broad spectrum.  They must
remember that their own initiation required many years of hard work.  Part of
the difficulty is a failure to notice that our students are taking other courses
as well as our own. The demands on their time can create a climate of
anticipated failure. I will say more about this phenomenon later.

Students have limited experience.  The kinds of experiences they have are not
connected to atomic structure, to spiral nebulae, et cetera.  They are connected
to why can't my grandfather remember things any more?  How is it that (I have
been told) still images on a television screen look as if they are really people
moving around?  What is virtual reality? How can athletes do the stuff they do,
and so on.

My own field of experimental psychology is useful for discussion because it
covers an enormous class of phenomena, and also interlocks with biology,
chemistry, and physics through neurosciences and psychophysics on one side, and
the personal and social sciences on the other. As such it will serve to
illustrate and informally substantiate my views on under- graduate SME&T in the
large. To summarize the discussion to follow, I suggest that the paths to
continuing progress in SME&T are:

      o  increasing relevance
      o  restructuring content
      o  modularization
      o  motivational design

In order to make science attractive to students who are not yet career driven,
but who may be drawn into a career choice by their college experiences, our
offerings must have relevance. This much-abused concept refers here to the
ability of a course of study to raise and answer questions important to (the
limited experience of) students. In the last ten years many curricular efforts
have attempted to achieve this relevance, sometimes, unhappily, with a loss of
precision. In my first attempt to make psychophysics an integral part of
introductory psychology(See endnote 1). I opened with the question of how an
airliner is guided to a safe landing during weather conditions that defeat 
direct visual control. Such tasks depend on translating visual codes into 
skilled action. In recent text materials(See endnote 2) topics in signal 
delectability theory center on issues of radiological diagnoses of breast 
cancer, and failure of memory in recognizing faces. Such questions engage the
student with problems they can understand. If science informs the answer,
relevance is insured.

Are there enough relevant topics? Again in my own field consider a spectrum of
subjects such as memory loss through aging or accident, virtual reality from
apparent motion through full- fidelity simulations, individual differences in
intelligence and other personal characteristics, cognitive development, social
and political consequences of individual attitudes and prejudices, motor skills
and athletics, sexual preferences and aversions, human error and its
consequences; the list could continue to a score or more.

We are restructuring the content of early science education in psychology to
motivate interest and to offer rational and more importantly -plausible - ways
to understand and solve real problems. I mean to do this by making data
collection one of the centers of effort to confront the questions of fact and
theory.   Students who collect their own data as compared with students who do
problems in a book own the data in a way that the book never provides. When they
are really your reaction times to stimuli of various kinds, then you may say,
"hey, can I respond faster to red or green."  Having those personal data becomes
and intrinsic motivator that is critical to the continuing activities of the
student.  And so rather than follow some preferred sequence, including
prerequisite course work, structure has been changed to show relevance.  The
tested retention of such information in our admittedly minimal current
evaluations suggests enhancements suggest enhancements in understanding by a
factor of six.

A third advance in my own field, and extendible to other disciplines, is the
technique of modularization. This refers to the construction of independent
sub-parts of a discipline along with its own auxiliary technical materials. 
Units of study do not need to be timed to coincide with rigid time frames.  If
we want to talk about memory and about lapses of memory, then, we could have a
memory module, and that memory module might last for two lectures or four
lectures or six lectures.  It might include experiments to see how memory works,
how it dissolves and disappears, et cetera.

Our current NSF support has helped us develop a variety of stand-alone
quantitative modules on topics in the human sciences from biology to sociology. 
We have modules of varying duration on human genetics, evolution, psychophysics
and decision theory, space and motion perception, and social psychology. We plan
to construct additional modules on cognitive mechanisms in perception and
action, motor organization, language and thought, theories of memory, virtual
reality, human engineering and ergonomics, psychometrics, animal conditioning,
learning and cognition, and quantitative sociology.

Each of these units is supported by quantitative material that undergirds the
topic. We do not demand prerequisites in, say, calculus, statistics, algebra, or
probability theory. Rather, we incorporate the required techniques in the module
itself. Any single module is studied for its nominal duration, which currently
ranges from 4 to 14 fifty-minute lecture/labs. The ancient bookkeeping of
academe proscribes such plans.  Our modules currently fill the standard semester
time scale, and are given in a "rational" order.  The ramifications of these
historic constraints are reviewed later.

Table 3.1:

Theory of      | Goal Orientation    | Confidence in  | Behavior Pattern
Intelligence   |                     | Present Ability|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Entity Theory  | Performance Goal    | if High        | Mastery Oriented
(IQ is fixed)  | gain positive       |                | seeks challenge, high
               | judgments           |                | persistence
               | avoid negative      |                |
               | judgments           |                |
               |                     | if Low         | Helplessness
               |                     |                | avoid challenge, low 
               |                     |                | persistence  
               |                     |                |
Incremental    | Learning Goal       | High or Low    | Mastery Oriented
Theory         | increase competence |                | seek challenge, high 
(IQ is         |                     |                | persistence
malleable)     |                     |                |

From Dweck, C. Motivational processes affecting learning.  American
Psychologist, October 1986.

In psychology the computer has become the required instrument for experimental
research and field data tabulation. It is our microscope, centrifuge,
accelerator, or telescope. Few institutions provide adequate access to these
machines for undergraduate use. In my own department of fifteen tenured faculty,
our financially challenged administration has recognized the importance of such
investment, and has provided 16 machines for undergraduate labs. These
sequestered microcomputers have made "open" labs possible. Only one graduate (or
often an advanced undergraduate) supervisor is needed, and the lab is available
to students in several courses on an essentially ad lib. basis. There are ca.
600 undergraduates per semester in our course offerings, so the ratio is quite
small. On the other hand only about 150 students need access to the machines.
With increased curricular implementations, we anticipate that this 1:10 ratio
will probably increase to 1:25, a figure that is probably close to optimum. As
with any computer implementation, we are hampered by software limits. We have
developed some experiments for use on our machines, and will be offering these
materials on our Internet home page.

Just as lab equipment (in our case microcomputers) is often in short supply, so
also are teaching materials. In the modules we are developing, primary sources
are the vehicle of choice for students to read. However, for many undergraduates
it is often necessary to provide some intellectual resources that may not be
part of their apperceptive mass. To this end we need texts that can provide
explicatory material to permit students to engage the primary source scientific
writings that have cast light on the central issues they study. We are trying to
provide such texts in our curriculum development program, but as any teacher
will recognize, this task is enormously difficult and time consuming.

The limit imposed by academic bookkeeping prevents us from using new formats and
methods creatively. With free standing modules on a variety of topics keyed to
questions of obvious and direct importance, we need to allow students to select
a group of such modules based on their own interests. If we intelligently
metricize the credit value of each module, we can allow students to select from
a menu of topics a personalized subset for study during a standard academic time
period. Students might be expected to take a variety of admixed modules, any
combination of which would be accepted by a registrar for appropriate academic
credit. In combination with newly designed evaluation procedures that we are
currently exercising, the entire task of selection (i.e., advising), pedagogy,
and credentialing could be simplified and packaged to minimize student anxiety
and time constraints. These revisions have direct implications for various sorts
of distance learning, and other forms of non- institution based education.

The previous reference to evaluation needs expansion.  In science education we
have commonly used so-called objective test formats to evaluate student
comprehension. Critics have charged that "constructive" tests better measure
student knowledge. Indeed, this topic is quite current(See endnote 3), but fails
to recognize the cognitive continuum between, say, a true-false test and a 
constructive essay. We have developed several waypoints on this continuum, and
is currently analyzing correlation between double blind scoring of quasi-
constructive answers, and items on objective (four-alternative) examinations.
Our preliminary findings support the view that the correlations are very high 
(ca. +.85). We score the objective tests by requiring students to eliminate 
incorrect answers. Originally we gave unit weight to each incorrect answer. Now
we have installed our examinations on our Web page, and process the test data by
more sophisticated statistics. We will shortly be able to differently weight the
incorrect answers as "easier" or "harder," and in this fashion improve the
ostensible validity of the score. Of course, all of these improvements are based
on plausibility, and wait real longitudinal validation.

Finally, the fourth topic - motivation - stands at the center of our efforts to
bring science to those who are traditionally absent from the feast. Of the
186,013 baccalaureate degrees in science and engineering awarded in 1989, 9325
were awarded to blacks(See endnote 4) (the data are similar in structure for 
Hispanics and Native Americans). Roughly 5 percent of the students are drawn 
from 13 percent of the population. We characterize this as a motivational 
deficit, not an intellectual one(See endnote 5).

To attack this problem we must recognize the distinction between learning and
performance. What we mean by the goals of learning are to increase confidence to
act.  What we mean by performance goals are to seek positive personal judgments.
That is, performance means you have gotten such a good score on the test, or
you have gotten such a bad score on the test. Either of those two can lead to
problems down the road.  When we can make clear that failure to learn is a
natural part of learning, and if we ensure that the goals of learning are
learning goals, then we may observe mastery after failure.  There are now more
than 50 studies that demonstrate that this is the case.  We also believe that an
entity theory of intellect can be replaced by an incremental theory, one where
IQ is malleable.  The format of our modules tries to accommodate these
principles.

We know that failure in performance goals leads to hopelessness and rejection of
the intellectual content.  We must examine how we frame our material so students
understand that it is not their performance that counts, but rather their
ability to grasp the issues and solve the problem.  And if they can't solve the
problem, then that failure is intrinsic to actively searching for more
information.

Let me conclude with some tangential remarks about how we might fix some parts
of SME&T; in particular how some aspects of these revisions would work.  Change
would occur because students would do things.  The teacher would say as little
as possible.  That is hard to implement.  After all, because of my competence in
language and delivery, I can amuse you, and it rewards me to see you smile,
applaud, and so on.  Teachers are mostly like that everywhere.  However, the
rewards to the teacher are mostly irrelevant to the student.  What the student
wants to know is how to do something, not to be told about something.  In
science, doing is everything.  Ideas are cheap.  It is work that is costly.  We
have concentrated too much on the transmission of ideas, and not enough on the
transmission of effort, activity, and the way to do it.

Unless we are proactive in respect of the changes that have to occur, we are
going to be left in the dust.  But there are things we have to know, e.g.,
whether any of these revisions have consequence.  I can talk about students
being happier, students getting better grades, students inviting others to join
the course, et cetera.  But if we don't know how many students go to the right
jobs or whatever, then all of this is just talk.

We need to plan major longitudinal studies to assess the consequences of science
education. We must answer the hard questions: Do the things we are trying to do
now have real consequences?  To find such answers will require a coherent and
well-organized research enterprise to see what happens 5, 10, and 15 years after
these changes go into effect.  In order to do this I think we must mount a
federal enterprise with continuity in design and support.  Management has to be
administratively structured in such a way that students can be tracked into
graduate school, the market place, and their later lives.  Do we change from 3
percent entering technical work to 7 percent because of the changes we make now
or not?

Finally what about our input?  What is K-12 science education today?  We know
that an enormous problem is the turnoff that has occurred in the middle and
senior high schools in science.  Now, attempts to rectify that by talking about
imitation science - I don't mean that in any disparaging way - but things like
nature studies and fanciful ecology are not going to increase our entry quality,
because the first time these kids take a college course that is serious about
these issues, they are going to have to look at population densities and
distribution functions of animals, and genetic structures, and they will say,
"hey, where is the ecology."  And we must answer it is in there somewhere, but
we have to work to get to it.  K- 12 education, as you know, is run in a
political environment that is essentially inviolate when it comes to attempts by
people in collegiate education to impose anything.  We have to suck them into
it. We can't push it down.  They will simply walk away.  They may not have
exactly the training that is needed to accommodate the materials we suggest they
provide.  In which case they are going to be very tough about saying, "well, I
think the stuff I am teaching is much more important than what you are doing,
and my kids love it, and they are doing very well, thank you, and furthermore 70
percent of the class got A's."  To reach the common schools will be a much
harder job than getting our own act together.

Professor Galanter received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in
1953, and advanced from Instructor to Professor from 1952 to 1959. He was
appointed a Research Fellow at Harvard from 1955 to 1957. He was a Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1958-59. His work with
George A. Miller and Karl Pribram on a new cognitive psychology was published in
1960 as Plans and the Structure of Behavior. Following his return from the
Center, he began a collaboration that resulted in the three-volume Handbook of
Mathematical Psychology, published during 1963-65. He completed his Textbook of
Elementary Psychology in 1966. In addition to these books, and his three popular
books in the Kids and Computers series published in 1982-84, he has contributed
more than 100 reports, journal articles, and book chapters in the fields of
psychophysics, mathematical psychology, aviation psychology, and utility
measurement. Professor Galanter was made Chair of the Department of Psychology
at the University of Washington in 1962. In 1966 he went to Columbia University
as Joseph Klingenstein Professor of Social Psychology and Race Relations. He was
named Professor of Psychology and Director of the Psychophysics Laboratory in
Columbia University in 1967.

           Testimony Delivered to the National Science Foundation
                Review of Undergraduate Education Hearings on
                 Employers Views on Desired Capabilities of 
               Undergraduate Students Entering The Work Force

                               Peggy Ruth Cole

   Director of Program Planning and Development, New York Hall of Science
                  Flushing-Meadows Corona Park, New York

Before coming to the New York Hall of Science 11 years ago, I was principal of
an independent school in New York City, and before that a graduate faculty
member of Bank Street College of Education, a teacher training institution also
in New York City.  I have 15 years of classroom teaching experience at both the
elementary and secondary levels.

While I will limit my examples to issues related to our particular science
center, I am also speaking on behalf of the 300 science-technology centers
around the country serving over 76 million annual visitors including children,
families, school groups, and teachers.  Informal science institutions offer
training to 150,000 teachers annually. All these institutions have an informal
approach to science, mathematics, and technology in common.  Unlike schools,
they are discretionary environments where visitors chose to come and select
their experiences based on interest, attraction, and a variety of other factors.
To quote the late Frank Oppenheimer, founder of the Exploratorium in San
Francisco, "Nobody flunks a museum."

Science centers have the potential to improve the undergraduate preparation of
new teachers. We have an externally evaluated program in operation for 9 years,
which is a model for other science centers.  Our Science Teacher Career Ladder,
a program within our Science Career Ladder, serving mostly women and minority
youth, involves cooperation among the science center, colleges and universities
and schools.  Together, we provide a support and training package which colleges
and universities cannot supply alone.

The program design is effective.  A survey of almost 25 percent of our Career
Ladder alumni showed that 34 percent of them are now teaching.  And our record
of attracting women and minorities to teaching is high.  Of our Science Career
Ladder alumni now teaching, 21 percent are African-American compared with a
national average of 5 percent of current teachers; 14 percent are Asian compared
with a national average of 1 percent; and 13 percent are Hispanic compared with
a national average of 3 percent.

How does the program work?  We employ 40 high school and 60 college youth
annually as our floor staff.  They work part time in a science- and
technology-rich environment, and receive both pay and school credit for the
experience.

Their job is to explain science to a broad public, from pre-schoolers through
senior citizens. The stimuli for both Explainers and visitors are l70 hands-on
interactive exhibits, ten on- floor demonstrations, and science activities
delivered through workshops and special events. Our youth staff learn science
and they learn how to teach science in an environment free from grades and
exams, but rich with science phenomena.  As a result, many discover both an
interest in science and pleasure in sharing it with others.  Consequently, the
majority decides to become teachers.

These students have, on the whole, come through a school system that teaches
science through the traditional avenues of textbooks, lecture/demonstrations,
and structured laboratory experiences with a reward system centered on high
grades.  Most never see the real-world application of science and math and they
rarely get to meet and interact with people who work in these fields while they
are still in decision making positions that will effect their entire futures. 
The result, as we all know, is an early turnoff to math and science by the very
population of women and minorities that will, by the year 2000, be the majority
entering the workforce.

The Science Career Ladder is almost 10 years old.  It has been a model for 12
other science centers around the country that have adapted aspects of the
program.  In the past decade we have worked with 20 colleges and universities
and 14 local high schools.  Almost without exception, we have been able to
develop meaningful partnerships with Cooperative Education Departments who do
not offer content course credit.  In some cases we have developed relationships
with Schools of Education but rarely with departments of academic science:
physics, biology, chemistry, etc.  The culture of undergraduate institutions is
curriculum driven, departmentally structured, grade oriented - formal. The
culture of science centers is content driven, discretionary, intergenerational,
exploratory, visitor driven - informal.  We are working hard to bridge this gap
and to help colleges see our program as relevant and meaningful to their
enterprise, but the academic structure that informs course development and
credit makes it very hard.

As employers of youth, in a rapidly expanding industry, with a significant
shortage of well- trained minority youth, we have learned to "grow our own."  We
identify women and minority youth who traditionally are not represented in
science and technology fields, and offer them science-related employment to both
serve our public and to prepare them for the workforce.  And we are succeeding. 
In addition to producing science teachers, the 1994 survey showed that 9 percent
are working in museums, and 15 percent are working in science and technology
fields.  The majority of our Career Ladder alumni are African American, Latino,
or Asian, and the minority of white students includes recently immigrated ethnic
groups.  They are poor, often first generation college students.

What are the workplace literacy skills we are developing in our youth staff? 
Because these positions are authentic, paid, and essential to the functioning of
the museum, our demands are those of any other employer.  We expect punctuality,
responsibility, appropriate dress and professional demeanor, teamwork, the
ability to meet performance standards, and above all, knowledge of science.  We
pay for training and we expect students to learn the science needed to work with
the public.

The science content we teach is directly related to our permanent, temporary and
traveling exhibitions, and school and public programs.  Interpreting our 170
permanent exhibitions demands a knowledge of anatomy, psychology of perception,
optics, wave theory, resonance, atomic structures, physics of light and color,
feedback systems, quantum physics, audio- technology, microbiology and
chemistry. Delivering programs and interpreting traveling and temporary exhibits
involves knowledge of astronomy, information technology, navigation, earth
science, manufacturing technology, architecture, and the biology of AIDS.  We
also expect our youth staff to use instruments from scanning electronic
microscopes to a functioning steam engine.  Students tell us the skills they
need to work at the New York Hall of Science test and exercise what they learn
in the university in new and more interesting ways.

Career Ladder participants learn questioning techniques, how to adapt
demonstrations for kindergartners and high school seniors, how to present the
same content in different ways to meet different learning styles, how to use
manipulatives to illustrate principles, how to attract and keep attention, and
how to control large groups.  Our Preschool Science Place is a laboratory for
learning about early childhood development and how to work with very young
children and their caretakers.  Unlike traditional undergraduate pre-service
students who get one or two student teaching placements, our Science Career
Ladder participants interact with students at every grade level from preschool
through graduate school, students with disabilities and learning problems,
students who are intellectually gifted, and everyone in between.  Many Career
Ladder participants discover an affinity with a particular grade level or
learning style as a result of their experiences at the Hall of Science.  Our
Career Ladder students get to observe teachers handling groups on class trips
and they form ideas about teachers and teaching from a perspective unavailable
in any other setting.

Some schools of Education offer field credit for the experience, one or two
offer student teaching credit.  Our experienced pre-service Career Ladder
students work in our teacher training programs, interacting with classroom
teachers as museum staff.  But most importantly, our students are rewarded for
exploration, discovery inquiry, experimentation, flexibility; the very
attributes essential for good science teaching and learning and, unhappily
rarely modeled in high schools and colleges.

In sum, the Science Career Ladder and similar programs around the country, are
providing students with workplace skills and science, technology and math
know-how within informal settings that supplement and enhance undergraduate
education.  The evidence is rapidly accumulating and it indicates that work
experiences explaining science in an informal setting have a positive impact on
career choice, science knowledge, and a sense of self-confidence and self
esteem.

The major obstacle science centers face is neither designing nor implementing
successful work-study programs for undergraduates.  It is, rather, convincing
the formal education community that experiences provided by science centers are
legitimate and valuable ways to provide young people with skills, motivation,
and know-how in science, mathematics and technology.  At the moment, science
center staff are included in reform efforts as advisors, committee members, and
representatives of community-based organizations.  But they are not taken
seriously as an integral part of undergraduate teacher preparation despite the
advantages I have just described.

These hearing are designed to help you assess what further needs and
opportunities we see in undergraduate education reform.  I would strongly
recommend a National Science Foundation program that provides major funding for
a few model programs which, like our Science Career Ladder, offer undergraduates
carefully constructed, content rich experiences in informal science centers.  If
requirements for successful proposals included: 1) academic credit in the
disciplines for participants; 2) college level administrative commitment to such
programs; and 3) a planning team of college and science center staff; we could
show the formal education community ways they might work with the informal
science community to reach our mutual goals, which are the preparation and
employment of a scientifically literate, and science- and technology-oriented
workforce. 

Peggy Ruth Cole is a senior staff member at the New York Hall of Science
responsible for the planning and implementation of new programs and for the
development department and its fundraising activities. She is the founder of the
Science Career Ladder, the signature, minority access education program of the
New York Hall of Science which is replicated nationally. Before joining the
Hall, Dr. Cole was special project coordinator at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk
, Virginia and the conceptual advisor to the Staten Island Children's Museum's
exhibition, " Once Upon An Island." She was Principal of the Fieldston Lower
School in New York City from 1981-1983. Prior to this, for 12 years, Dr. Cole
was a graduate faculty member of the Bank Street College of Education in New
York City. She serves on the editorial board of Curator, the journal of the
American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Cole is nationally active as a reviewer,
author, and speaker in the field.

    Math, Science, and Technology Undergraduate Education in America: One 
                         Small Business Perspective

                             Israel Joseph Galvan

                          President, GHG Corporation
                                  Houston, TX

Introduction

These are the personal views of one small business owner deeply involved in
current and emerging technologies. However, I wish to emphasize that I claim no
special expertise on education.

My name is Israel Joseph Galvan and I am President of GHG Corporation, a
computer systems engineering company based in Houston, Texas. We have been in
business since 1979 and employ about 200 people.

Criticism of the American educational system comes from a variety of directions.
It has increased in volume and intensity and, worse, it has become a permanent
issue in every political campaign. Whether the fundamental role and purpose of a
university education is in need of a serious national debate is problematical.
However, there appears to be some confusion and lack of a unifying principle in
our educational system-a lack of clarity.

Arguably, the last serious debate on the role of the university occurred in the
1930's between the camps of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the traditionalist, and
John Dewey, the progressive. These two giants proposed ideas that were
fundamentally different, but their views were clear and unambiguous. Hutchins
believed that the university should be a community of scholars, a place to train
the intellect and to transmit a Great Tradition of culture. Dewey saw education
as an experience and a process for coming to grips with and solving real world
problems, a bridge between school and society. Hutchins opposed professional
schools; Dewey embraced them. It is safe to say that a hybrid of Dewey's ideas
won.

As it should be in any democracy, the debate on the nature and function of
higher education continues, but the current issues are not as fundamental. The
debate is less on the role and more on quality, efficiency, and economics. It is
centered principally on delivery and implementation issues. The core of
contemporary criticisms, I believe, validates our present educational system.
Our educational system is sound. It is only in need of minor adjustments. Yet
there are some aspects of our educational system that do require further
clarification.

What is the role of our educational system in training our work force, as
opposed to educating our work force? What is the role of our community college
system? What is the relationship between our university system and our community
college system?

These questions are beyond my simple musings. Contrasted to the complex problems
visited on our educational system, I fear that this modest presentation may be
too narrow and parochial. My intent is to simply share the personal observations
and views of a small "high- tech" firm.

The Environment

The world is undergoing a transformation not seen since the Industrial
Revolution, but at an increasingly faster rate. The time from idea to
development to implementation has virtually disappeared. The forces driving this
change began in the early 1960's and were not anticipated. Our finest research
institutions and our finest minds thought that the 1960's were going to be the
decade of nuclear energy. It was going to satisfy our every need for energy.
Energy was going to be so cheap it would not have to be metered.

They were wrong, of course; it turned out to be the decade of the computer, with
IBM as its corporate manifestation. For most of the next two decades, IBM became
the corporate model for the world, emulated for its technical and business
innovation. Little did we know that the heart of IBM's computer, the Central
Processing Unit (CPU), consisting of a dozen circuit boards, would be replaced
by another CPU the size of a dime. Driven by this new CPU, which is embedded in
every facet of our lives, including our psyche, our world and our perceptions of
that world changed, and continue to change before our very eyes. It has created,
and is continuing to create, new industries. It has changed, and continues to
change, existing industries. It has transformed, and is continuing to transform,
every sector of our economy. It has eliminated, and is eliminating, jobs;
created, and is creating, new jobs; and is contributing significantly to our
country's anxieties and sense of uncertainty. Indeed, even IBM feels threatened.
It is threatening the classic American corporate model and creating new ones. It
has empowered the technician and the small business.

Much has been written and said about the economic importance and significance of
the small business community. Small businesses:

     o  provided virtually all of the net new jobs from 1987 to 1992;
     
     o  were 99.7 percent of all employers in 1992;
     
     o  employed 53 percent of the private work force in 1992; and
     
     o  are the source of considerable innovation.
     
So says the U.S. Small Business Administration. And yet most of our national
educational and economic policies do not reflect the uniqueness, diversity, and
role of small business in the current transformation.

These are fast changing times; these are exciting times; and these are perilous
times. However, there appears to be one universal constant:  "Knowledge is
Power." For the present, this verity could possibly be restated "Mathematical,
Scientific, and Technical Knowledge are Power." And it is the role of our
educational system and this board to insure that all Americans are armed with
this knowledge. Of course, nothing much is at stake, except the economic well
being of this country.

Small businesses, especially "high-tech" ones, live, operate, succeed, and fail
in this environment. Most small businesses share common problems and concerns,
but "high-tech" small businesses, I believe, have a number of unique concerns
and problems intimately tied to undergraduate science, mathematics, and
engineering education. Generally, the small business community has very little
direct contact with the university community, except as a source of talent. In
the university research and development world, cooperative agreements and
sponsored research is the exclusive domain of the large corporation. The
overhead cost of a typical university is daunting to any small business wishing
to fund a research project.

The Real World

Recently, a colleague said that the three most important concerns of his
business were: capital, capital, and capital. Hyperbole not withstanding,
capital is always a problem, but equally important is good management and good
people. This, of course, is true for any business, small or large. We both face
a rapid and sustained force of technological change, and a diminishing life
expectancy and relevancy of particular skills. It is challenging our abilities
to maintain our skill base tuned to this change.

Unlike the large, well financed corporation, the small "high-tech" business has
minimal redundancy in its skill base and less resources to keep that skill base
continuously trained. The loss of a key employee can be devastating. Thus the
recruitment, retention, and continuing training of a quality work force, while
always important, has become critical. In this highly competitive market place,
we can not afford to lose employees, lose our sense of unity, or disrupt the
"team." We can not afford to treat employees as expendable commodities. We have
to nurture them, train them, in short, value them. This is not without a
significant financial burden and increasing pressure to make tough management
decisions. Yet, we must remain competitive. We are still subject to all of the
forces of a competitive market place: being raided by highly skilled
professional recruitment agencies, market demands for increasingly narrow job
descriptions, competitive compensation packages, and the bottom line.

For example, it is not unusual for us to have to pull a highly skilled computer
scientist from a revenue generating project in order to send him or her to an
expensive short course on some very specific emerging and proprietary
technology. An alternative is to establish an internal training program with our
own courses and instructors, and we have. But this is very expensive. Another
option is to lay off employees when their substantial skills are not considered
adequate for more narrowly defined skills. To retain a competitive posture, we
are forced to make decisions at odds with our sense of fairness, our sense of
community with our employees, and the long-term health of the firm. However,
survival is basic and immediate. Though necessary, it is no longer sufficient to
have a solid education in a particular technical discipline., thus demonstrating
a compelling need for the development, implementation, and delivery of
continuing education programs that keep pace with the changing technical
environment.

This fact is equally true in non-degree technical fields. For example, the
transition from mainframes to distributed workstations is abolishing the need
for the traditional computer operator and other affiliated paraprofessionals.
This same transition is creating new jobs such as local area network (LAN)
administrators, managers, and other related jobs. However, instead of training
the current work force, businesses are replacing them.

We expect recent college graduates to arrive at the work place fully armed and
ready to contribute to the bottom line. Perhaps our expectations are misplaced.
Perhaps it is the role of the business community to provide the necessary
training. Additionally, it appears that recent college graduates generally lack
practical, immediate skills; skills demanded by current market forces; skills
such as being able to work in teams, being familiar with current technologies,
and a fundamental understanding of systems engineering are glaring examples.
Unfamiliarity with working in teams and with current technologies and systems
thinking may be a manifestation of dated curriculums. The currency of detailed
technical skills is important, but graduates also lack fundamental skills.
Skills with the written and spoken language are deteriorating. In fact, it has
become a clich that scientists and engineers can not write. This paper is
probably a good example.

In summary, the most glaring deficiencies in Math, Science, and Technology
Undergraduate Education that I have observed are:

     o  Lack of team skills in recent recruits;
     
     o  Lack of communication skills, both oral and written;
     
     o  Lack of a dynamic and current curriculum and continuing education 
        program; and
        
     o  Inability of small businesses to access the applied research and 
        development capabilities of our educational system.

Modest Recommendations

The National Science Foundation should promote greater participation between the
Small Business community and our educational institutions. More specifically,
the Foundation should:

    o  Encourage the development of curricula allowing undergraduates to work on
       more relevant projects; projects that require multiple disciplines and an
       integrated team effort. This will allow them to experience a project 
       through its entire life cycle. This will encourage teamwork, systems 
       thinking, and significant practice in the development of their oral and
       writing skills.
       
    o  Encourage the continuous improvement and relevancy of the curricula.
       
    o  Encourage the development of a better, more relevant, and more accessible 
       continuing education program. This program should be made available to 
       non-degree technical people, post graduates, and even post doctoral 
       students. Considerations should be given for small businesses to consult
       in the development of such a continuing program. In addition, small
       businesses should be considered in its implementation and delivery.

    o  Encourage an active partnership between small business and our university 
       system. Undergraduates should be encouraged and allowed to work on small 
       business sponsored projects and receive credit.
       
    o  Encourage and sponsor more relevant and applied research projects at the 
       undergraduate and masters level. The small business community should be 
       allowed and encouraged to participate, share cost, and benefit from the 
       research.

    o  Encourage the small business community to sponsor application research
       without the burden of the educational institution's overhead. Perhaps, 
       the Foundation could make overhead moneys available to the university 
       community if they could match it with appropriate direct cost moneys.

    o  Finally, the Foundation should encourage the small business community to
       work more closely with the Community College System in the development of 
       curricula more efficacious to small business and to the paraprofessional.

Israel J. Galvan graduated Cum Laude from the University of Houston's Cullen
College of Engineering in 1973; receiving a Bachelor of Science Degree in
Electrical Engineering. He is a member of the Electrical Engineering Honor
Society; received a NASA Space Act Award 1991, received an Honor Award from the
Central Intelligence Agency and the Directorate of Science and Technology in May
1996. In 1973, he joined IBM as a product development engineer. He worked on a
variety of applications research and product prototype projects. He assisted IBM
in establishing a manufacturing plant in Milan, Italy. He began his own company,
GHG Corporation, in 1979 as a systems integration company.

                 Employers Views on Desired Capabilities of 
                    Undergraduates Entering the Workforce

     
                               Alfred L. Moye
     
                       University Relationships Manager
                     
                              Robert W. Ritchie
     
                         Director, University Affairs

                            Hewlett-Packard Company
                             Palo Alto, California

Introduction

We applaud NSF for having these hearings and for focusing on undergraduate
science, math, engineering, and technology (SME&T) education.  Significant
change in how we educate in these critical areas is required, and NSF is
uniquely positioned to take the leadership in encouraging this change.  NSF is
the Federal agency looked to by the Academy as having the general health of
higher education as its focus, without the encumbrance of specific, narrowly
defined missions, such as the Departments of Defense, Health, or Commerce.

The organization for this presentation is:

    1. The Environment and Why it Requires Change in Undergraduate SME&T
       Education
    2. The Characteristics Required of Graduates to Succeed in This Environment
    3. The Kind of Undergraduate Education for There to be Such Graduates
    4. Specific Programs to Move Towards These Kinds of Undergraduate 
       Experiences
    5. The Environment and Why it Requires Change in Undergraduate SME&T 
       Education

The Environment and Why it Requires Change in Undergraduate SME&T Education 

Our society is radically different from the one in which the current educational
system developed.  Changes in our world have had a major impact on our sense of
what students need to learn and how the learning should be delivered to them. 
Increasingly, we are recognizing that mastering a body of knowledge is simply
not enough.  Students must acquire lifetime skills, such as critical thinking,
quantitative reasoning, effective communications, along with such abilities as
finding needed information and interacting well with others.   We want graduates
who have the capacity to learn not who know everything.

Some institutions are rethinking and redesigning their curricula to reflect the
shift from teaching content to enabling students to develop life-long learning
skills.  Some faculty understands the implications of the information explosion
and has re-engineered their courses accordingly.

An important, and not so subtle, change has been a shift from life-long job
security to a more realistic hope for career security. This shift is not greatly
appreciated because it places responsibility on employees to manage their
careers; and to continue learning in order to avoid technological obsolescence.

Today's worker has to learn to survive and thrive in a world that is globally
interdependent. Workers must be able to operate and communicate
cross-functionally, cross-culturally and across geography.

Teamwork, group problem solving and collaboration characterize today's
high-performance workplace.  Learning in industry shifts from the classroom to
peers and teams.  Knowledge creation shifts from the individual to the
organization where problem solving and decision- making skills are important
components.

Characteristics Required of Graduates to Succeed in this Environment

This environment requires that all graduates have skills for continued learning.
Workers must assume responsibility for managing their careers, for continuous
upgrading of their skills and acquisition of new skills in order to be prepared
for emerging opportunities.  Managing one's career in this way is the way to
guarantee career security--to position oneself to have a career for as long as
one wants to work.  The onus is on the individual.

To prepare students to be productively employed for life in science, math,
engineering and technology, the undergraduate experience must consist of a solid
foundation in mathematics and science fundamentals.

They must have an understanding of the modern, rapidly changing,
high-performance workplace and knowledge of what is required to succeed and
thrive in such a workplace.

They must have the flexibility to expect and embrace change throughout their
careers, skills for and the commitment to working in teams, cutting across
vastly different areas of expertise whether it is development, manufacturing,
marketing, or whether it is with other people from around the globe.

Workers must have an appreciation for the global interdependence of our
communities and have the ability to work across geographies.  In particular,
students planning for careers in science, math, engineering, and technology must
be prepared to understand the business and social implications of the activities
in which they will be engaged.

The Kind of Undergraduate Education for There to be Such Graduates

To prepare graduates, who have the above skills, schools must drastically change
the undergraduate educational enterprise, especially in SME&T education.

An expectation of all undergraduates in the next millennium must be basic
science and technology literacy, regardless of area of concentration.
Information technology will increasingly impact our lives as citizens, voters,
politicians, and parents.  Without an understanding of issues arising from
science and technology, it will be difficult to be a fully functioning member of
a democracy dominated by technology and public understanding of science and
technology will remain very low.

K-12 teachers must have better preparation in SME&T.  K-12 teachers who are
science, math, technology-illiterate, will not be able to encourage students to
consider careers where SME&T skills are needed.

A much higher percentage of our populace must understand science, math,
engineering, and technology to be successful in the workplace, and hence, to
lead financially secure lives.  For this reason, ways must be found to make
SME&T education interesting and attractive for a much broader cross-section of
our populace.

To make education interesting and attractive requires a shift to
student-centered learning environments in which the faculty are guides, in
contrast to the current, largely mass production, teacher-centered ones, in
which the faculty are lecturers imparting information. Someone said it requires
a shift from the sage on stage to the guide at your side.

It requires faculty who are knowledgeable of careers outside the academic world
so that they can make their courses more relevant and advise students of career
opportunities using SME&T knowledge in jobs that are not closely aligned with
the narrow interests of most faculty.

Acquisition and application of a better understanding of the learning process
and of different learning styles is required, especially those which may be the
prevalent styles of segments of our society which have not traditionally been
attracted into mathematical, scientific, and technological careers.   We know a
lot about how people learn, but too few faculty, especially in science and
engineering, are using the results of research on learning in their courses. 
The knowledge is there, but our faculty does not use that knowledge.

Individualizing education will lead to much heavier reliance on current and
shortly forthcoming technology, enabling learning experiences to be delivered on
the learner's demand across space and time (just-in-time, anytime, any place
learning).  Faculty must become proficient at using the technology for
education.   They must have both the willingness and commitment to use
technology and also the support and time from the university for professional
development.

Undergraduate education programs must find and apply ways to impart basic
written, visual and oral communication skills and skills in working in teams. 
In addition, students aiming for science, math, engineering careers need to
learn about business and societal issues to be able to understand implications
of decisions they make.

At a Hewlett-Packard sponsored conference in October, 1995, attended by 18
faculty involved in SME&T education, the topic of appropriate characteristics of
institutions of higher learning in the year 2000 was discussed and debated.  The
conclusion of this group was that the college or university of five years from
now must be learner-centered and include the following:

     o  Anytime, anyplace access
     
     o  Collaborative learning and problem solving
     
     o  Support for life-long learning 
     
     o  Significantly improved learning outcomes 
     
     o  Equity, access and success across all populations; and
     
     o  Economic viability and globally competitiveness

They also concluded that this requires a very different kind of academic
environment: one, which has agile and change-oriented institutions.  One which
applies and integrates appropriate technologies, exhibits cooperation and
resource-sharing among government, industrial, and other educational
institutions, disseminates and applies best practices from elsewhere,
effectively evaluates the results of its activities, and has a faculty reward
structure which encourages these activities.

We absolutely agree with these conclusions.

Specific Programs to Move us Towards These Kinds of Undergraduate Programs

The discussion above indicates where the focus of Federal programs should be,
and they should be designed to move as quickly as possible to the academic
environment outlined above.

To reinvent institutions to be more agile and change oriented, those individuals
within the institution who are change agents should be supported and rewarded. 
For example, a program of summer grants and awards to faculty for significant
curricular development, application of best practices into their behavior, etc.,
could be developed.

To encourage use of technologies, infrastructure for learner-centered anytime,
anyplace activities could be mounted.   Faculty at the HP October 1995, workshop
recommended leveraging funding by requiring matching funds from the institution.
Faculty saw this as a way to get institutional commitment and begin to
institutionalize successful programs.  NSF might also require institutions to
state how they intend to sustain funded programs through operating expenses or
endowments for technology upgrades and enhancements.

To enhance collaboration, NSF might fund faculty time to work with industry to
transfer insights from the corporate world to the academy.  Much of the
breakthrough research today is coming out of industry, and faculty would benefit
from the experience.  Similarly, encourage faculty to work with K - 12 teachers
with, for example, summer funding to increase the number of high school
graduates ready to pursue the undergraduate experience.

Faculty who attended the HP workshop ranked new models of collaboration -- among
institutions, commercial-industrial collaboration, as well as collaboration with
government - among their highest priorities.  They also felt it was important to
launch some grand experiments; especially grand experiments with multi-campus
involvement.  To disseminate best practices, NSF could fund centers for
accumulating and distributing best practices much in the model of the Synthesis
coalitions' NEEDS project, which is funded by NSF.

To develop and apply evaluation methods, NSF could fund research into evaluation
of program design to enhance learning, especially learning in populations
previously under- represented in SME&T programs.

To encourage modified faculty reward structures, NSF might consider awarding
summer grants to faculty and administrators to create alternative ways to
recognize faculty involved in educational innovation.  Finally, on this point,
NSF has special leverage with its research programs and could require
descriptions from institutions as to the steps the institutions are taking to
modify their faculty reward structure as a condition of (or at least as a
significant factor in) the award of a research grant.

Conclusion

Thank you for the opportunity to appear today.  Our environment mandates changes
in SME&T education if we are to produce graduates who can succeed in today's
rapidly changing information society.  We applaud your interests and believe
your focus can have a unique and positive influence on American higher
education.

Alfred L. Moye became Hewlett-Packard's Director of University Affairs in May
1996. He leads HP's worldwide interaction with key universities, including the
company's ongoing programs in such areas as research, recruiting, marketing,
training grants and public advocacy. In addition, because of the crucial role of
universities in developing skills and technologies needed to improve national
competitiveness, Dr. Moy leads the formulation and communication of HP's views
on U.S. policies for technology and higher education. He was previously Manager
of Engineering Education Performance Technology at Hewlett- Packard.  Prior to
joining HP in April 1984, Dr. Moy was national educational sales manager and
director of the Atari Institute for Education Research He was also vice
president for academic affairs at Roosevelt University, Chicago, and vice
chancellor for student affairs and associate professor of chemistry at the
University of Pittsburgh. During the Carter Administration he served as deputy
assistant secretary for higher and continuing education He has published an
organic chemistry laboratory text and has authored several articles in chemistry
and chemical education journals.  He is an officer of the Board of Trustees of
West Virginia Wesleyan College and the National Technological University, and a
member of the Board of Visitors, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of
Pittsburgh. He was recently elected to the Board of Trustees of the University
of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Moy received his B.S. degree from West Virginia Wesleyan
College and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, both in chemistry. He
is also recipient of five honorary doctorates.

From January 1990 until his retirement in 1996, Robert W. Ritchie served as the
first Director of University Affairs at Hewlett-Packard Company. He led HP's
worldwide interaction with higher education, including the company's on-going
programs in such areas as research, recruiting, marketing, training, grants and
public advocacy.  Prior to becoming Director or University Affairs, Dr. Ritchie
was Director of the Computer Systems Center in HP Laboratories from 1988 through
1989.  From Science Laboratory of Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center.
From 1962 to 1983, he was on the faculty of the University of Washington, first
in mathematics and, subsequently, computer science.  He formed the Department of
Computer Science there in 1966, was its first chair, and then chaired the
department again from 1977 to 1983, helping it achieve its current rating among
the top ten in the country.  While at the university, Dr. Ritchie also served as
Associate Graduate Dean and Vice Provost of the University.  From 1960 until
joining the faculty at the University of Washington, he was John Wesley Young
Research Instructor in Mathematics at Dartmouth College. He has served as the
chair of the Committee on New Areas in Applied Mathematics of the Conference
Board of Mathematical Sciences, chair of the Computing Research Board, and
co-chair of NSF Workshop on Quality in Engineering Education.

             Enhancing Engineering and Manufacturing Education:
                Industry Needs, Industry Roles(See endnote 6)  

                              John H. McMasters

             Senior Principal Engineer, Aerodynamics Engineering
                      Boeing Commercial Airplane Group
                              Seattle, Washington

                                James D. Lang

    Director of the Technology Division, New Aircraft and Missile Products
                          McDonnell Douglas Aerospace
                              St. Louis, Missouri

The problem of how to provide quality-engineering education (as contrasted with
training) in our universities, and the appropriate role of industry in this
endeavor, has been a topic of controversy and debate for decades. Ever since the
proliferation of research-oriented universities began in the early 1960s, a
widening gulf has been developing between our colleges of engineering and the
industries they support.  It has become increasingly clear to those of us with
an interest in industry-university interactions and recruiting that the
curricula in most of the major universities in this country are now badly out of
balance, with a too heavy emphasis on engineering science (analysis) and
competition at the expense of design (creative synthesis), manufacturing and
cooperative learning (teamwork). Despite an increasing number of recent
refreshing signs of change, the current under-emphasis on the quality of
undergraduate education is further cause for major concern with respect to the
impact this may have on the overall competitiveness of our future industrial
technical workforce. Of particular concern is the inadequate exposure to
manufacturing issues given to most undergraduate engineering students. Design
(engineering) and manufacturing are inextricably bound together in modern
industrial practice, and this fact generally is not reflected in current
engineering education programs in the majority of our research oriented
universities. This situation poses a significant long-range problem for industry
in this country unless sustained, cooperative actions are taken to restructure
and rationalize the present system. Furthermore, industry needs a greatly
increased level of continuing education and training, much of which could be
provided by developing strong and continuous linkages with our universities and
community colleges.

    "Poor ... education wastes human potential If schools are sound...[students]
    will graduate with the knowledge, skills and motivation to help further
    build our nation, and with the foundation needed to help them enjoy full and
    productive lives. 
                                                        Frank Shrontz
                                                        CEO, The Boeing Company

    "A scientist discovers that which exists. An engineer creates that which
    never was."
                                                        Theodore von Karman

    "In time, the ... public and possibly even the 'educated class' will come to
    appreciate that engineering is no more applied (and therefore second rate)
    science, than science is theoretical engineering."
                                                  C. R. Chaplin(See reference 1)

    "The mind is not a receptacle; information is not education. Education is
    what remains after the information that has been taught has been forgotten."
                                             Robert M. Hutchins(See reference 2)
                                                       (after Benjamin Franklin)

The Current Situation

The state of education in this country, especially in science, engineering and
technology, has become a matter of increasing concern to many of us. The recent
National Research Council working paper (Major Issues in Engineering Education)
of the Board on Engineering Education, as only one recent example, identifies
many of the major issues that need to be addressed.  While the problems we
perceive encompass the whole system from pre- elementary through post-graduate
education and training, the focus of the present paper is on needed changes in
university undergraduate education programs. Our paper is sometimes strongly
worded, but we believe that the assertions made can be adequately documented and
defended.  Extended discussions with a large number of our colleagues in
industry, academia (including many students) and government show that while
there are significant exceptions to what we have written, and continued denial
that anything very basic is wrong with our current system of higher education,
there is now an increasing degree of admission that the following observations
have validity.

o   Too many of the faculty and administrators in our colleges of engineering
    remain complacent. The primary message from academia continues to be: Give
    us more money and we will do more (of the same) good things.

        o  Improvements in curriculum, etc. are always needed, but nothing basic
           is broken in the educational system we now have. Witness the number
           of foreign students in our graduate programs as only one measure of 
           the success of the system.  

        o  Research money continues to come (from largely government sources) to 
           those willing to work hard enough to get it, which is good because so
           many departments are now so heavily dependent on it. The fact that 
           too much of this research is of very limited value to our industry
           seems to be irrelevant.
        
o   From an aerospace industry vantage, as potential employers of the 
    universities' graduates, we see vast opportunities for improvement. We are
    increasingly "dissatisfied customers."
           
        o  New hires must serve excessively long apprenticeships (three-to-five
           years) before they become fully productive (i.e., we must fill 
           significant gaps in their education's as well as provide job-specific
           training). 
           
        o  We see too many new graduates with an inadequate grasp of what 
           engineering (as contrasted with engineering science) is and how one
           practices it, particularly in the currently evolving industry
           environment. Too few of our engineering graduates seem to have any 
           idea of how to work in teams or how to manufacture anything. Fewer 
           still seem to understand the process of large-scale, complex system
           integration, which characterizes so much of what we do in our
           industry.
           
        o  Based on limited data available to us, academic success (as measured 
           by test scores and grade point averages) shows little discernible
           correlation with subsequent performance on-the-job (as measured by 
           salary growth and perceived value of an employee to a company). Those
           students who are judged the "best and brightest" on the basis of
           grade point average are Frequently those who have worked hardest in a
           highly competitive academic environment of separate, specialized 
           courses, and are often least prepared to work cooperatively in teams 
           to engineer an integrated complex system which is economically and 
           operationally viable.
           
o   Industry continues to be limited, and sometimes-underutilized partner in the
    engineering education process. Merely throwing money into the system is 
    inadequate.
    
        o  Industry recognizes its vested interest in education, but is largely
           preoccupied with staying in business while producing a proper return 
           on the investment of its shareholders. Improving the national 
           educational system is not in most corporate charters. 

        o  The modern international marketplace is highly competitive and
           volatile (particularly in the aerospace industry). Historically, 
           industry has tended to be shortsighted in its planning, while longer-
           range forecasts have generally proved unreliable. The unknown 
           consequences of the present era of world political and economic 
           uncertainty only exacerbates the difficulty of making sustained, 
           long-term commitments to "lower priority" supporting activities such 
           as generic research and pre-employment education. At best, industry 
           has too often been viewed as a "fair weather friend" by much of 
           academe. 
           
        o  Discussing appropriate engineering education programs is made very
           difficult when a higher-level manager from a given company (with a 
           background in one discipline, as practiced when he was an engineer 
           years earlier) tells a dean of engineering one version of "what 
           industry needs" while a working lead engineer from another discipline
           tells a department chairman quite another story. In the end, both 
           stories get lost or the one closest to what the listener wants to 
           hear gets heard. Industry really would do all involved a great favor 
           by developing and delivering a more coherent position to academia on
           this issue--even if the message is complicated or a mere statement of
           principles. [A listing of the "Desired Attributes of an Engineering
           Graduate" is appended as on candidate for such an industry-wide 
           message].

Much more than the above has been written (See references 1-13) on the faults 
(and less frequently, the real virtues) of our educational system in general, 
and a large number of documents have been prepared recommending a wide range of 
reforms. The university system has proved remarkably resistant to many of these
assaults, however, and little real change has been apparent until quite recently
- spurred in part by the massive dislocations caused by the end of the Cold War 
and the concomitant "right-sizing" (downsizing) in our industry l4 which has 
been further fueled by increasing international competition. In defense of our
universities it also must be pointed out that the increasing complexity of our
technology, the past availability of large sums of government money, the
changing economics of maintaining a high quality (largely graduate student
focused) academic and research program, a lack of adequate industry attention,
and the perceived weaknesses of K-12 public education are in part responsible
for the higher education system we have today - which in the face of greatly
increased international competition, is no longer good enough. While it is easy
enough to point fingers or blame "outside" causes for our current situation, the
problems we now face remain ours to deal with. Since we all (industry,
government and academe) share some measure of culpability for what we have
created, we should now be able to go beyond the point of deciding "whose fault
it is" and work together in a spirit of enlightened self interest to create a
new system which better meets the future needs of all of us and our nation as a
whole. Further studies of the problems we face are not needed; what we do need
are practical plans and processes for cooperative act ion. These plans should be
based on rigorous use of systems engineering principles to define requirements
for and develop the design of, the new approaches needed. Appropriate metrics
must also be developed and applied.

What We Need - Some Opportunities

What is needed is a long-term, sustainable and fully cooperative effort based on
systems engineering principals aimed at producing the sort of education (the
most valued product of the university system from an industry perspective) which
will develop future engineers with the skills and attributes listed in the
Appendix. This program would be based on:

o  Recognition of the basic distinction between "engineering science" (analysis) 
   and "engineering" (design/creative synthesis) in both the education and 
   employment of our future engineers. "Design" and "engineering" are 
   fundamentally synonymous1,6 and thus we must accord design education the
   respect to which it is due.
   
o  Recognition that what you design is what you have to (attempt to) build and
   therefore that design and manufacturing are inextricably bound together - 
   both in professional practice and in university curricula. 
   
o  Recognition that no 4-year (or 5- or l0-year) university program is ever 
   going to be able to produce a fully and permanently qualified professional 
   engineer, and thus that efforts to cram "everything a student must know" into
   this time frame is futile. A student must be prepared for life-long learning
   and major new partnership efforts are required to provide continuing 
   education at all stages of an individual's career.
   
o  Recognition that our future prosperity depends on industry/university 
   teamwork and cooperation at all levels, including student course work and in
   university faculty interactions.

o  Development of a modern approach to teaching design and manufacturing as a
   fully integrated, team focused, part of the university curriculum (including
   such exposure in core engineering science courses) beginning at the beginning
   of a student's freshman year. Intrinsic in this is the recognition of the
   profound importance of systems engineering and information technology (far
   more than mere "computer literacy") both in the curriculum and as a means of
   educational program delivery.
   
o  Providing our students a proper view of the context (the whole system) within
   which engineering is practiced. This context includes economics, history,
   manufacturing as well as environmental, legal and ethical aspects of our
   profession. 
   
o  Providing an appropriate hiring and reward system for engineering (design) 
   and manufacturing educators within a given university structure, and which
   at least provides a faculty with sufficient experience and dedication to
   teach these topics well. 
   
o  Recognition of the distinction between education (a primary university 
   function) and training, much of which must be viewed as an industry 
   responsibility. We must understand the appropriate (and perhaps new) 
   relations between our research universities and our community colleges in
   providing both initial and continuing educational and training services. The
   differing requirements and available resources of large corporations and 
   smaller companies for training must also be recognized and dealt with.
   
o  Proactive leadership and involvement from all relevant professional societies
   (e.g., AIAA, ASME, ASEE, SAE, etc.) in building processes to link industry,
   academia and government participants. Their traditional role should be 
   expanded and integrated across societies in recognition of their members' 
   current needs. Their role, along with ABET, in formalizing and enforcing 
   educational standards provides strong leverage to develop and implement 
   engineering curricula changes and to achieve results on a national level.

Roadblocks

It is easy enough to make lists of what we in industry need, but it must be
clearly recognized that there are some serious stumbling blocks to be overcome
in accomplishing the changes previously advocated. Some of the most obvious are:

o  While many in both industry and academe now recognize the need to change, 
   there is a serious discrepancy between our two cultures with respect to the
   sense of urgency we each feel regarding the rate at which changes must occur.
    
o  Too many university administrators and faculty members have little or no 
   knowledge of what industry does, how it does it, and what their graduates 
   need to know to function effectively in an industrial environment. 

o  Too few in industry have an adequate understanding of how our current 
   universities function, how the faculty reward system works, or the 
   constraints under which faculty members must operate in the system we have.
    
o  Design education generates little research revenue and leads to few 
   publications in "the right journals." Manufacturing has been held in even
   lower esteem until quite recently since, in academic terms, it is perceived 
   to lack "intellectual content."

What We Can Do - Recommendations for Action

Engineering education has become "big business" and there is much inertia and
resistance to the sort of changes advocated here, which also echo
recommendations in several recent national studies (i.e., those prepared under
the auspices of the ASEE15 and the NRC). Many believe that no further studies
are needed. We need action. These actions include:

o  Establishment of a process to develop an industry-wide position on: "What we
   (industry) want from our colleges of engineering and what we are prepared to
   do to help provide it." 
   
o  A much better focused use of our "aid to education" resources (both money and
   people). This includes a balance between government-funded research and 
   educational programs.
   
o  A change in the university reward system that recognizes that quality 
   teaching must be at least on parity with funded research with regard to 
   faculty promotion and tenure.
   
o  Changes in the degree structure to establish engineering as a true 
   professional program and which are consistent with future industrial 
   technical workforce needs. 
   
o  Greatly expanded faculty - industry exchange programs. The objective of such
   programs should be to provide faculty with first-hand knowledge of industry
   practice and issues which would allow them to devise curricula which are 
   truly responsive to industry needs rather than to merely allow faculty to
   continue their usual research at another (industry) site. Models for such
   exchanges exist in NSF Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry
   (GOALI) and the Boeing-A.D. Welliver Faculty Fellowship programs.

o  No culture change of the magnitude we believe to be required can be 
   accomplished in a single meeting or by conducting yet another study.
   Likewise, no single party, working in isolation, can resolve the diverse 
   problems we confront What we must do is establish and support (at both
   national and local levels) processes which encourage individuals from 
   industry, academe and government to work together on a sustained basis to
   address the practical aspects of how we are going to change. A national forum
   to include relevant professional societies, perhaps in the leadership role, 
   should be sought to address these issues and to create the continuing process 
   for discussion and resolution. Agreements on curricula options should be 
   sought on a periodic basis. ABET accreditation criteria and the ABET 
   accreditation process can be used as a mechanism for now to formalize and 
   enforce the agreements.

Concluding Comments

The central message of this paper has been that the world is changing
dramatically(See reference 14) in the wake of the Cold War, and just as broad 
sectors of industry are changing to meet new challenges and opportunities, our
universities (particularly in technical education) must change as well. The 
needed changes we can foresee will not come as swiftly as some would wish, nor 
will they come easily. But change must come if we are to sustain our prosperity 
in an increasing complex and highly competitive international environment. Of 
the changes advocated in this paper, perhaps the most profound and sweeping must
be the rethinking and implementation of appropriate partnerships between 
industry and academe in the education and training of engineers. In our view, it
is no longer tenable (if indeed it ever was) to accept a practice in which a
university "educates" a student to some level of competence, and thus having
done its job and "completed" its task, turns this "finished product" over to an
employer to do with as may be fitting. From now on we must truly prepare a
student to become a "life long learner" - an individual who will require and
actively seek continuing education as well as training opportunities for the
entirety of his or her career. In this process, industry and academe
(appropriately aided by government) must become active partners, each doing what
it is best qualified to do in fully cooperative efforts from the beginning of
the educational process. We all have much to gain if these new partnerships can
be established, and much to lose if they are not.

Dr. John H. McMasters is an aerodynamicist and airplane design instructor in the
Boeing Commercial Airplane Group and serves as an Affiliate Professor in the
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington in
Seattle. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder
and a Ph.D. from Purdue University; all in aeronautical engineering. Before
joining Boeing in 1976, he served as a Project Officer for air-to-air missile
systems at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory and taught at Arizona State
University and Purdue. He is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA and was an ALAA
Distinguished Lecturer in 1992-94. He is also a member of the Board on
Engineering Education of the ASME and the Boeing University Relations
Coordinating Committee.

Dr. James D. Lang is the Director of the Technology Division, New Aircraft and
Missile Products, at McDonnell Douglas Aerospace. He is responsible for
technology development and transition. Dr. Lang is an AIAA Fellow, a member of
ASEE, and a member of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board. He retired from the
U.S. Air Force as the Aeronautical Systems Division Deputy Commander for
Engineering. He also led the Avionic Laboratory and the Flight Controls
Division. He has over 3000 flight hours including 320 combat missions as a
Forward Air Controller. He has a B.S. from the U.S. Military Academy, a M.S.
from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the Cranfield Institute of
Technology, England.

Acknowledgments

This paper is an outgrowth of a series of position papers written for various
audiences over the past several years, the most recent version having been
prepared as part of a study of aeronautics materials and manufacturing
technologies needs conducted in 1994 under the auspices of the National Center
for Advanced Technologies (NCAT) in Washington, D.C. The authors believe that
the issues raised in this paper transcend the more narrowly focused concerns of
the NCAT study, however. We are greatly indebted to a large number of
individuals for providing thoughtful comments and encouragement in the
preparation of this paper and its predecessors. While too numerous to list
comprehensively, a few key individuals must be cited for their special
contributions: Richard Hartke (NCAT), Drs. Joe Bordogna and Elbert Marsh (NSF),
Stephen G. Moran (NASA), Earll Murman (MIT), Lee Nicolai (Lockheed), and Daniel
P. Schrage (Georgia Tech). In addition, P. M. Condit, A. R Mulally, R. L.
Bengelink, R A. Davis, A.M. Erisman, J. F. McGuire, T. Tobey, B. J. White, and
M. H. Wiese of The Boeing Company provided major input and inspiration for
earlier versions of this paper. The authors remain solely responsible for all
opinions expressed, however, and these do not [yet] necessarily represent the
positions of either The Boeing Company or McDonnell Douglas Aerospace.

References

1. Chaplin, C.R., "Creativity in Engineering Design -The Educational Function,"
   The [UK] Fellowship of Engineering, 2 Little Smith Street, Westminster, 
   London SWIP 3DL, November, 1989.
   
2. Hutchins, R.M., The Learning Society, NY: New American Library, 1969.

3. Grinter, L.E. (Chair),  Report on Evaluation of Engineering Education, 
   American Society for Engineering Education, Washington, DC, 1955.
   
4. Evans, D.L., McNeill, B.W., and Beakley, G.C., "Design in Engineering 
   Education: Past Views of Future Directions."  Engineering Education 80 (5):
   517-522. July/August, 1990.
   
5. Ferguson, E.S., Engineering and the Mind's Eye.  MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992.

6. McMasters, J.H. and Ford, S.D., "The [Airplane] Design Professor as
   Sheepherder (An Industry Role in Enhancing Engineering Education)," AIAA 
   90-3259 (Invited), ALAA/AHS/ASEE Aircraft Design and Operations Meeting,
   Dayton, OH, September 17-19. 1990.
   
7. McMasters, J.H. and Ford, S.D., "An Industry View of Enhancing Design 
   Education," Engineering Education, 80 (5): 526-529.  July/August, 1990.
   
8. McMasters, J.H., "Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained: Paradigm Shifts in 
   Engineering Education," SAE (Invited) Paper 91-1179, April, 1991.
   
9. McMasters, J.H., Holt, S.C. and Derwin, W.J., "Adventures in Engineering 
   Education at Boeing (The BCAG Summer Intern Program)," ALAA Paper 92-1093,
   February 1992.
   
10.Nicolai, L.M., "Designing a Better Engineer," Aerospace America, Vol. 30, 
   No. 4, April 1992, pp. 30-33.
   
11.Hoover, C.W. and Jones, J.B. (Co-Chairs), Improving Engineering Design,
   National Research Council. Washington. D.C., 1991.
   
12.Dertouzos, M.L., Lester, R.K and Solow, R.M., Made In America, M1T Press, 
   Cambridge, 1989.
   
13.Covert, E.E., "Engineering Education in the 1990s: Back to Basics," Aerospace
   America, 30 (4): 20-23.  April 1992
   
14.Ellis, R.A., "At the Crossroads (Crisis and Opportunity for American 
   Engineers in the
   
15.1990's)," Engineering Workforce Bulletin No. 130-131, Engineering Workforce 
   Commission of the American Association of Engineering Societies, January 
   1994.
   
16.Engineering Education for a Changing World, Report of the Engineering Dean's
   Council and Corporate Roundtable of the American Society for Engineering 
   Education, October, 1994.

           Appendix:  DESIRED ATTRIBUTES OF AN ENGINEERING GRADUATE

    o  A good grasp of engineering science fundamentals.
         o  Mathematics (including statistics) 
         o  Physical and life sciences 
         o  Information technology
 
    o  A good understanding of the design and manufacturing process (i.e., 
       understand engineering).
 
    o  A basic understanding of the context in which engineering is practiced.
         o  Economics 
         o  History 
         o  The environment
         o  Customer and societal needs
 
    o  Possesses a multi-disciplinary, system perspective.
 
    o  Good communication skills.
         o  Written
         o  Verbal
         o  Graphic
         o  Listening
 
    o  High ethical standards.
 
    o  An ability to think both critically and creatively - independently and 
       cooperatively.
 
    o  Flexibility - an ability and the self-confidence to adapt to rapid/major
       change.
 
    o  Curiosity and a desire to learn - for life.
 
    o  A profound understanding of the importance of team work

Note: This is a list of basic, durable attributes into which can be mapped
specific skills reflecting the diversity of the overall engineering environment
in which we in professional practice operate. In specifying desired attributes
(i.e. desired outcomes of the educational process), we avoid specifying how a
given university goes about meeting industry needs. Curriculum development is
viewed as a university task to be done in cooperation with their "customers,"
and in recognition of their own local resources and constraints. Industry, as an
important customer, must be an active partner in this process.

      Testimony on the Views of Employers on Undergraduate Education in 
       Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology(See endnote 7) 

                               Robert T. Jones

     President and Chief Executive Officer, National Alliance of Business
                       Washington, District of Columbia

Permit me to make three statements that generally characterize business
community positions regarding higher education.

First, higher education should demonstrate greater understanding of the needs of
the private sector.  Too often higher education seems unaware of job
requirements and changes in the workplace.  I believe that maintaining a close
connection between what goes on in our educational system and the rapidly
changing work environment is essential.

Second, higher education curricula should reflect the changing conditions in the
workplace. More students need to experience the challenges and rigor of
contextualized learning.

Third, higher education should help develop the work ethic that will sustain
students in their eventual careers.  Note that many corporate leaders say that
new employees are fine _ even more responsive than they used to be.  These same
leaders point out that they screen a substantial number of potential applicants,
selecting only the best from that pool.  As long as that pool is large enough
and active enough and vital enough, firms will always manage to hire the kind of
people they need.  We must however be concerned about all the rest, those who do
not enjoy the skills needed for employment and advancement.

Corporate leaders tend to believe that the factual knowledge derived from
undergraduate education can quickly become obsolete.  Further, the life
expectancy of new entrants in their first job is very short.  Relatively
inexperienced employees move on to another company or another function or task
more rapidly than ever.  Companies are also increasingly reluctant to hire
recent college graduates.  Before they invest in hiring on a long-term basis,
they want to see degree holders with three to six years of work experience in
the modern corporate system who can show an effective adaptation to the updated
demands of the new workplace.

The typical employer no longer defines educational preparation solely on the
basis of scientific knowledge or experience, or mathematical and technical
competencies. Increasingly, employers are looking for the ability of new
scientists to think clearly and communicate their thoughts, to write clearly, to
negotiate, to listen, to work on teams, and to function effectively as part of a
diverse work force.  Employers' perceptions are that schools are not paying
enough attention to the development of these skills.  They do not seem to be
taking business very seriously, nor listening to our cues that how we hire is
now different.

I urge you to look at the hiring processes that companies are utilizing, to
study carefully the methods of testing and interviewing.  What are the broad and
durable skills and competencies they seek?  It is very clear that when
applicants don't understand the needs of employers, they are not likely to be
hired.

New employees are increasingly expected to demonstrate as one CEO calls it
"boundary-less" skills.  This all happens because of the changing nature of the
way we work.  Engineers and scientists are now "on the factory floor."  They are
not isolated in a lab. Engineers and scientists now deal with customers and
their ability to deal with customers is key to their being hired in the first
place.

There is a growing perception that a college degree per se is of minimal value
to business. Business is more concerned about the level of a job applicant's
competencies, the breadth of that applicant's competencies, and the applicant's
ability to assimilate, manage, and utilize information. How those skills are
acquired -- whether during studies for an MBA or a MS in science or math, or as
part of some other educational experience -- is not of great import.

Related to this focus on competencies rather than credentials is the increasing
demand for certification programs. The demand is growing for continuing
education programs that let employees re-enter the education community in order
to update their skills, to stay current on new technology and procedures and to
do so in short certifiable bites that employers can recognize.  Simply taking
people out of employment for two or three years for an advanced degree for the
sake of improving skills and knowledge doesn't work effectively for many jobs.
The way we traditionally boxed up these degrees doesn't match well with the
needs of today's work force.  We will probably see within the next 24 months a
very rapidly growing discussion about how we create certification programs where
people can engage frequently and efficiently in continuing education.

In summary, business believes more strongly than ever that post-secondary and
continuing education are crucial for all potential workers.  How to sustain the
strengths of our existing system while responding to the vibrancy of the
business environment is a challenge that higher education must meet.

A nationally recognized expert in the workforce development field, Roberts Jones
has over thirty years of organizational management and public policy experience
in the training and education field.  As a lifelong advocate for investing in
people, Mr. Jones is widely credited with helping place workforce development at
the forefront of the nation's public policy agenda.  Prior to joining the
Alliance, Mr. Jones was vice president of RJR Nabisco, Inc.  Mr. Jones served
both Presidents Reagan and Bush as Assistant Secretary of Labor, responsible for
federal workforce development and training policy addressing the significant
changes in work and the workplace.  Jones played a key role in the Hudson
Institute's landmark research project and report, Workforce 2000: Work and
Workers for the 21st Century, and was responsible for the Department of Labor's
SCANS Commission, which for the first time spelled out the skills necessary for
success in the workplace.  Mr. Jones was awarded the Presidential Distinguished
Executive Award, the highest honor in the Federal government, in 1986.  Mr.
Jones received his B.S. in Psychology from the University of Redlands in
Redlands, California, and performed graduate work in Public Administration at
the American University in Washington, DC.  He also served for four years in the
United States Air Force.

                Testimony to the National Science Foundation
                     Undergraduate Review Subcommittee: 
          Employers Views on Desired Capabilities of Undergraduates
                           Entering the Workforce

                               John L. Sisler

                Manager of Exploration and Production Training
                   Shell Exploration and Production Company
                               Houston, Texas

Thank you for the opportunity of share views on undergraduate science,
mathematics, engineering, and technology (SME&T) education from the perspective
of an Energy Industry employer of graduates from these programs.  As manager of
E&P Training in Shell Exploration and Production Company, I am increasingly
aware of the challenges and demands placed on BS and MS SME&T graduates in out
technical professional workforce. How well our Company, Industry, and Nation
surmounts this challenge is of critical importance to future success and
survival in a global market place.

While this testimony is from the viewpoint of a large, primarily domestic oil
and gas exploration company, many of the phenomena discussed appear to extend
beyond the upstream portion of Energy Companies.  They are reportedly
commonplace throughout other portions of US Industry.

One characteristic of the upstream Energy Industry's technical professional
workforce is the mixture of scientists and engineers.  Geosciences (Geology and
Geophysics) together with Physicists and Computer Scientists are combined with
Electrical, Geological, and Petroleum Engineers to form the skill pool
responsible for finding and delineating new hydrocarbon deposits.  Engineering
graduates become increasingly important in developing, producing, and managing
existing oil and gas reservoirs through economic lives to eventual abandonment.
These include Geological, Petroleum, Chemical, Electrical, Mechanical, and Civil
Engineering graduates.  They are integrated with the skill groups used to find
and delineate who are also involved in the later phases of the E&P cycle.  This
workforce is predominately BS and MS level with a lesser number of Ph.D.s who
typically transferred from Research into the operating organizations.  The way
work gets done by this mix of SME&T graduates across the spectrum of E&P
activities has changed significantly in the last five years.

Organizational Characteristics

Changes in the job environment associated with organization redesign are
profound.  An ongoing process attempts to create work group structures that are
focused, efficient, and responsive to change.  Nearly all upstream US Energy
companies, including Shell E&P Company, have experienced dramatic organizational
changes.  In most cases these resulted in somewhat smaller SME&T workforces and
significantly fewer supervisors and managers. Work now being done often exceeds
levels prior to the changes.  Further change is very unlikely but a return to
the type of work group structure characteristic of the past is very unlikely.

Integration

Currently, most U.S. Energy companies have emphasized integration at every
organizational level.  Formerly organizations were divided into separate groups
based largely on skills and type of work performed.  Exploration was typically
separate from Production, and within each there were subdivisions such as
Geology and Geophysics in Exploration, and similar splitting within Production
into Operations and Engineering that was in turn split into various engineering
scientific specialty groups.  Today, multidisciplinary teams that are formed to
accomplish a specific project or manage a group of assets within a defined
geographic area do work.  These teams are interlocked to form multi-disciplined
project groups responsible for major business segments.

Today's integrated work team organization has far fewer managers and
supervisors. Typically, supervisors lead large, diverse work teams and do not
exercise the level of detailed control characteristic of past more hierarchical
work structures. Someone will probably lead the SME&T graduate with a dissimilar
educational specialty.

Leadership Style

The style characteristic of successful leaders today is one of coach and
coordinator rather than command and control that was possible when past
supervisors frequently were experts in subordinates' jobs.  Some work was
associated with personnel administration and the individuals now do development
formerly done by managers and supervisors themselves.  The SME&T graduate will
probably find the leader not as deeply involved in how work is done, provided it
is timely and correct.  Today's leader is far more interested in results than
style. Because of the size and diversity of typical work teams the leader today
is rarely as involved in each individual's personal skill development as were
past supervisors.  Individuals are expected to be proactive in defining their
needs and seeking our opportunities to grow.  The leader's role is to enable and
encourage, but not to be prescriptive.

Performance Measures

Performance measures for individuals in today's organizations attempt to focus
on business- relevant results.  Compensation is more directly tied to current
business results.  To a growing extent individual results are tied directly with
Team results.  In contrast, past performance measures too often dealt with style
and activity level.  These may have had only an indirect linkage with business
objectives.  The SME&T graduate is finding that it is increasingly difficult to
prosper personally while the ship of which he or she is a crewmember sinks.
Coming from an undergraduate system that exclusively recognizes individual
achievements this change may cause some to question "fairness." 

Skills

Skills needed to successfully function in today's work team environment are
somewhat different from the past.  Each person needs an awareness of the role
and contributions of others on the team.  In-depth specialized knowledge must be
accompanied by skill at relating various parts to the whole and finding
solutions to problems that formerly might have "fallen between the cracks" of
the different specialties and departments.  Skills such as communications and
teamwork are essential. Unfortunately these are often given low priority during
the SME&T professional's undergraduate education.  Working together
interdependently in a team to achieve a common goal rather than competitively to
garner individual recognition is a very satisfying change for many, but one that
does not come easily to some SME&T graduates who have thrived in their former
arena.

Personal Characteristics

Along with the organizational changes there have been changes in expected
personal characteristics of the Technical Professional workforce.  Skill areas
deemed important for success in the current and future work environments include
many areas besides the traditional SME&T subjects.

Technical

Sold preparation in the relevant sciences and mathematics together with their
application to create beneficial products remains the most valuable asset that a
SME&T graduate can bring into our workforce.  Without this, chances of success
are slim.  It is particularly important to gain a broad foundation during the
undergraduate period.  This will provide the means to adapt and thrive as
changes occur that impact the various applications used in the workplace.

One characteristic often missing in graduates of US SME&T programs is ability to
understand system versus segments.  Too frequently graduates who have impressive
transcripts from highly acclaimed universities exhibit limited understanding of
how their segmented knowledge fits together.  An ability to understand context
and to fit pieces into a larger framework are essential in working in an
integrated, multi-disciplined environment.  Critical thinking has greater
importance than problem solving.

Commercial

SME&T graduates are expected to possess more commercial acumen than in the past.
The necessity for improved financial performance has caused accountability for
profit and loss to be at much lower levels, frequently at the work team level. 
A vocabulary once restricted to Business School graduates is now routinely used
by technical staff.  Engineers and scientists are no longer as insulated from
accounting, financing, and marketing.

Risk management is particularly important.  SME&T graduates typically are
expected to define uncertainty, develop risk assessment, and play a major role
in managing risk.

While SME&T graduates are not expected to possess abilities to perform
specialized commercial tasks, they do need to understand their importance and
how they must be integrated with technical work to achieve business success. 
Clearly SME&T graduates need to respect the importance of the commercial context
of their work.

Information Technology

Without question, advances in computing and information technology (IT) are
enablers for many of the changes discussed here today.  All SME&T graduates are
expected to have skills that allow application of advances in IT to their work. 
In fact, many technical professionals in E&P spend the bulk of the time at work
at workstations or PCs.  Most are not developing new software, but are using
increasingly integrated applications systems provided by others. Major concerns
are with data management and getting work done in complex internal IT systems. 
Many find their undergraduate programs did not provide sufficient expertise in
the personal productivity tools.

This is one area in which recent SME&T graduates as well as technicians have
exerted leadership.  Without their training that embraces IT as just another of
the natural work tools, progress would have been much slower.

Teamwork

All SME&T graduates must possess teamwork skills.  While many factors go into
developing these, one that is partly a consequence of the undergraduate
educational system stands above the rest.  Respect for others who have different
educational backgrounds is essential.

Academic divisions between sciences and engineering and further subdivisions
within each too frequently imprint SME&T graduates with personal biases.  These
are obstacles to effective teamwork.  Rivalry between academic schools,
departments, and even specialties within a particular field, create stereotyping
of various groups.  Academic role models that participate in such activities are
sending very wrong messages to their students.  In today's business environment,
one's leader and office mates may well be from one of the groups held in low
regard by his or her academic role models.  The need to respect others extends
beyond the SME&T disciplines to include those in business, humanities, and other
groups such as law, which must work together in teams.

Communication

Good communication skills are even more important today.  In addition to the
long-standing expectation that SME&T graduates be able to write and speak
effectively, the challenge today is the audience.  Former audiences were often
composed of specialists who all spoke and understood their specialties' jargon. 
Today an important audience is the multi-disciplined work group and its
leadership.  Increasingly the SME&T graduate is also communicating with external
customers and stakeholders who generally do not understand the "insider"
language of science and technology.  This becomes particularly important to
those working with environmental issues.

Electronic tools are playing a bigger role as a means of communication. 
However, the skill needed is to understand the cycle of listening,
understanding, creation and delivery of a clear message to a specific audience. 
These are independent of the tools and should be incorporated into SME&T
undergraduate programs.

Leadership

More leadership skills are expected from everyone in flat organizations.  Fewer
opportunities exist for formal management jobs, but there are many more
opportunities for individuals to hold ad hoc leadership roles.  As mid-level
managerial and coordinational jobs have disappeared, individuals in teams are
doing some of the work.  The leadership roles and skills are very closely
associated with teamwork rather than exercise of the power of an organizational
position.

Change Management

The final personal skill in this list is the ability to proactively participate
in the processes used to continuously improve.  Change Management is now a part
of every SME&T graduate's responsibilities.  Each must acknowledge that the
future is unpredictable.  Major changes and retaining flexibility to alter
strategies will probably be needed to survive both as business and individuals.

Individuals who accept personal responsibility for their own deployment and take
actions to grow personally and professionally will be more likely to succeed. 
The employer of SME&T graduates is no longer providing the level of security and
development direction seen in the past.

Recommendations

1. Support programs, which are interdisciplinary and integrated.  Do not 
   restrict this to just the SME&T fields.  Opportunities for undergraduate
   SME&T students to become involved must be provided.

2. Support programs that instill rigor and breadth in BS/MS SME&T studies. Focus
   on teaching and shaping those who constitute the bulk of our workforce.  
   Meaningful recognition must be available to faculty and institutions that do
   this well.
   
3. Support programs that provide BS/MS students with the interpersonal/
   organizational/teamwork skills now essential in today's workplace.

John Sisler is Manager of Exploration and Production Training for Shell Oil
Company in Houston, Texas. He has 36 years of varied Shell experience as a
geoscientist, engineer, and manger.  During his career he has worked on domestic
exploration and production projects in Alaska, California, New Mexico, Texas,
Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico, and outside the United States in The Netherlands
and Iran. Prior to joining Shell he received a BA in geology from Rice
University and a MS in geology from Stanford University.  He is a member of the
American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the Society of Petroleum
Engineers, the Geological Association of America, and the Houston Geological
Society.

        Testimony on the Views of Employers on Undergraduate Education
      in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology(See endnote 8) 

                              Patrick E. White

             Vice President, Strategy, Bell Atlantic Corporation
                                Arlington, VA

I certainly appreciate the opportunity to be here to talk to you about
undergraduate needs, particularly with regards to the telecommunications
industry.

As the telephone industry evolves, one of the first things I think we need more
of is engineering programs designed to educate generalists, to produce graduates
with almost the same kinds of skills that John Sisler of Shell Exploration and
Production Company was just describing.

Very frequently, the kinds of issues that at least our undergraduate engineers
face require participation in multidisciplinary teams, but more than that, they
are often not focused on one specific area of technology.  They cover a variety
of different areas.  I think that a program in undergraduate education designed
to produce engineering "generalists" would perhaps better match that need.

Our situation is analogous to the issue of the best strategy for educating
medical doctors. A general practitioner course of study often meets the greatest
need of communities for medical services.  General practitioners can be coupled
with the selective use of specialists.  In the past there was a tendency to
stress the education of medical specialists.  Now we realize the importance of
general practitioners.

We clearly do have that need for specialists in telecommunications, but for the
vast majority of jobs, a general program matches our needs much better than
specialized programs. Where we do need specialists, a bachelor's degree or even
a master's degree is often not enough to cover the field in depth. We really
need to hire Ph.D. level scientists or engineers to get the best contributions
in specialized areas.

Another aspect that I wanted to bring out is that telephone technology, like
most high-tech, electronics-type fields, is undergoing pretty much a revolution.
For example, just look at one aspect of this field over the last ten years,
fiber optic transmission.  Ten years ago, engineers were talking about
multi-mode fiber with LEDs.  That has shifted very quickly through a number of
different technology stages.  Today, ten years later, nobody ever talks about
multi-mode fiber, and nobody talks about LEDs.  Instead, the talk is about
lasers, fiber amplifiers, and dispersion-shifted fibers.  In other words, the
field is moving so fast that it is pretty hard for me to imagine how the
universities can really keep up with current technology.

In fact, if you look at most programs in engineering, you typically see that
they are pretty much covering the same old topics, and that is surprising, given
the pace at which the technology seems to be moving along.

I think that there is certainly several impediments or several areas within
teaching that need to be dealt with.  Tenure policies, I think, need to be
looked at to make sure they are really encouraging faculty to keep abreast of
technical areas, and that universities continue to hire the best-equipped
faculty or the faculty with the most knowledge in some of these new technology
fields.

I also think that the types of research that are being funded also have an
impact.  If you pick up almost any journal these days, I would say at least
two-thirds, maybe three-quarters, and in some cases even 100 percent of the
selected papers seem to represent minor tweaks in insignificant technical areas,
most of which isn't all that relevant to what industry really needs in terms of
research.

If you have faculty who are moving in that direction, then you can easily see
why there will be a widening gap between what the universities are actually
teaching young engineers and what industry needs if we are to remain at the
cutting edge.

The last thing I wanted to talk about in my prepared remarks - related to the
plea I made at the outset for more a general education in engineering - is that
I believe we should reexamine the lack of a foreign language requirement in most
colleges and universities.  Increasingly there is globalization of just about
every aspect of industry.  Too often we go to meetings with the French, Germans,
and Japanese and find that they can speak English plus their own language.  In
negotiation, I think we are at a significant disadvantage in only knowing
English.

I also would put in a plea that the types of elective options that are
associated with engineering, currently drawing from a traditional liberal arts
menu, might also sensibly include wider options, e.g., business-oriented
courses, finance, economics, intellectual property law. These are all very vital
aspects for a young engineer's education.

Patrick White is Vice President of Research and Development at Bell Atlantic
Corporation.  Prior to his current assignment, he was Vice President of
telecommunications strategies and before that he held a number of positions with
Bell Communications Research, Inc. ("Bellcore"), including Assistant Vice
President of the Network Architecture and Analysis Research Center and Assistant
Vice President, New Architecture and Service Concepts Planning. Prior to joining
Bellcore in January 1984, Dr. White held various software development
supervisory positions with Bell Laboratories, commencing in 1973. Dr. White
holds a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from
Northwestern University. He has authored numerous technical papers and edited
technical journals.  Dr. White is a member of the Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi
national engineering honor societies as well as a member of the IEEE and the
Association for Computer Machinery.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Eugene Galanter, Contemporary Psychophysics, in New Directions in 
Psychology,
ed. by T.Newcomb. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1962

(2) Eugene Galanter, Psych Tech Notes V .2.1 Adams Bannister Cox, 1994

(3) Construction vs. Choice Cognitive Measurement, ed. by R.E. Bennett & 
W.C.Ward. LEA, Hillsdale, NJ, 1993.

(4) Adapted from National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, 
Tenth Ed., 1991.

(5) Carol Dweck, Motivational processes affecting learning. American 
Psychologist. October 1986.

(6) Presented at the 1995 American Society for Engineering Education Annual 
Conference and Exposition, Anaheim, CA June 25-28, 1995.

(7) This text is an edited version of Mr. Jones' verbal testimony to the EHR
Advisory Committee on November 1, 1995.

(8) This text is an edited version of Dr. White's verbal testimony to the EHR
Advisory Committee on November 1, 1995.