The Dilemma of the Professional Engineers' Licensing Program
Authors: Weber Arthur W. 
Published: December 2007

The organizations endorsing the licensing of engineers are the National Council of State Boards of Engineering Examiners and the National Society of Professional Engineers. The NSPE has hoped, and often assumed, That it has an exclusive right to be the voice of engineering. With only 60,000 members, however, and other serious limitations to its sphere of influence, this voice fails to carry either exclusiveness or authority.

Introduction

One of the strangest fictions encountered in our professional life is the concept that an engineer's interest can be divided into three neat and distinct packages:the educational, belonging to the Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD);the technical, belonging to the Engineers' Joint Council (EJC); andthe professional or legal phase, belonging to the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE).

It does not seem possible for any profession to thrive on such an artificial fragmentation of important interests. The engineer is a whole person, lives a whole life, and works in an integrated society with its overlapping problems of technology, human relations, business administration and the law, to mention a few. A most unfortunate and probably unexpected circumstance in the engineering profession is the existence of two distinct types of engineers doing professional work - the licensed and the unlicensed practitioners. No other professional group is confronted with a division of this type. There is too much refusal on the part of each group - the licensed and the unlicensed-to recognize and admit the very strong position of the other. Those with licenses have a strong and well established legal position. Those without licenses have an immense position of power and prestige that results from larger numbers and their record of many outstanding accomplishments. Hopefully, general recognition of the problems discussed here will bring about a number of necessary changes, Between 1907, when Wyoming passed the original registration law for professional engineers, and 1960, when the Island of Guam passed the most recent licensing law, all 50 states and four territories have enacted laws which in one way or another regulate the practice of engineering as defined in their statutes. There is substantial similarity in the registration laws of these 54 licensing agencies, but there is no corresponding agreement in the application of these laws to candidates applying for licenses. As could be expected, there are states with high standards, other states with low standards, and still others that vary between the extremes. Various authorities estimate the number of engineers currently at work in the United States to be between 600,000 and 800,000, the variation resulting obviously from the definition of an engineer. For this discussion, we can define the engineer as the trained, creative type, doing work normally described as professional in character. He is the engineer who is occupied in research, development, design, management, construction, teaching, or other professional work. At the most recent count, 217,000 such engineers have licenses from one of the 54 licensing agencies and are, therefore, entitled legally to call themselves professional engineers.

JPT