The Design of Engineering Education as a Manufacturing System

In recent years there has been great concern over what many are calling the “tuition bubble” in American higher education. Baumol and Bowen, in 1966, observed that because personally delivered services, like professors teaching engineering, exhibit low productivity growth there is a continuing and compounded rise in its real cost. Additionally, universities, in competing for students, tend to invest in expensive assets. The resulting cost of the education and the amount of student debt threatens to rise beyond the intrinsic economic value of a US college degree, especially in the face of equivalent substitutes. While the problem and possible solutions are discussed by politicians, journalists, scholars, and college administrators, their solutions are not always supported by scientific evidence. There is no discipline in which this concern is more critical than engineering. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has found that without technological innovations, there will be no production of new goods, no economic growth and no human development. The overall objective of this research is not only to analyze but also to design, or re-design some of the essential aspects of engineering education systems using principles from manufacturing and industrial engineering, axiomatic design, computer simulation and financial analysis. The proposed system is able to operate at lower costs while producing high-caliber engineers. A review of the state of the art revealed examples of value-added functions in higher education used to support public policy decisions in primary and secondary schools, but value-added functions for engineering education were not found. There was no evidence of process charts or value stream maps for engineering education in the literature. Examples of value and financial analysis, manufacturing system design and simulation have been applied in industries other than manufacturing such as healthcare. The literature does not reveal substantial attempts to apply these methods to the higher education industry as a whole or to engineering education in particular. The approach presented relies on the decomposition of the functional elements of engineering education as well as defining a quantum of learning as an inventory unit. Methods used include a value-added analysis, process charting and value stream mapping as well as axiomatic design decomposition, computer simulation and financial analysis. The results show that the net present value (NPV) for the student increases over the interval from [tstart to tgraduation] as the time to employment post gradation decreases for a given discount rate. This is due to receiving employment income sooner during the cash flow. Engineering schools might benefit economically from reduced costs and higher tuition revenue resulting from greater system capacity. The synthesis and generalizations show that by decomposing engineering education to a quantum unit of learning, a new system based on manufacturing principles is able to be designed, simulated on a computer and then analyzed for financial results leading to a new engineering education paradigm.